Gamma, as you know, is eight years old. She reads various princess magazines and wears the glittery costume jewelery that comes vacuum-wrapped on their covers. Her hair goes down to her waist. The hair in fact is a bit of a problem as it is very fine and she being eight rarely brushes it and it tends to dreadlock in the back. But we have detangling spray and she and her mother manage to get the rats’ nests out after I threaten to cut it off.

Gamma has wanted earrings for ages. When we were in the United States, against her mother’s wishes we had her ears pierced at this stand in the aisle of a mall. Her mother wasn’t there with us, having stayed behind in Austria for that trip; and we didn’t ask her permission, figuring it would be easier to be forgiven for getting the ears done than to get her to agree to it.

Alpha, you see, thought Gamma was too young for it. She thought she tended to fester and infect. She thought, since Gamma’s big sister Beta had such problems when she got her ears pierced at that age (they somehow got ingrown and we had to take her to the doctor to have them removed, after which she waited until she was a teenager to get them pierced again), we ought to wait longer with Gamma.

I told this all to Gamma, in a solemn voice. I said, we’ll have to disinfect them twice a day and rotate them daily. She swore on god’s grave she would do all that was necessary. I said, tendency to get infected, we’ll have to be careful. She swore she would be. I made her pay for it with her own money, to make it seem that much more serious. She had a ton of money from somewhere and everyone was buying everything else for her anyway, it was a symbolic thing. It’s not like I’m cheap or anything.

She sat bravely and seriously for the piercing. The lady got the gun out and put one in each lobe.

We disinfected them twice a day at the beginning, until it looked like they were healed. I asked her daily if she had rotated them. She said she had. Somedays I rotated them myself just to be sure.

She bought extra earrings and looked forward to the day she could switch them. To be safe, she asked me to do it. That day was yesterday, the day before school restarted.

I looked at them first. They weren’t ingrown. I popped them out. One hurt just a little. The other she screamed bloody murder. And it bled like a, well, like a headwound.

I disinfected them and tried to put new earrings back in. More bloody murder screaming. I started with the painful one just to get it over with. The post went in okay, but I couldn’t find the exit hole. I feared it was badly infected inside.

Around that time, she decided to let them grow back shut. The hell with earrings. She’ll give it another try when she’s older, she said. Just don’t come near me with those earrings!

Alpha is taking her to the doctor today to have her ears looked at. If she’s lucky, maybe she’ll be able to re-insert earrings. Or at least save her earlobes.

The book I mentioned an entry or two earlier, I didn’t mention the title because the whole joke was that is how I respond to most of the books I read, while I’m reading them. Once I finish them I might be disappointed, or not, but during the reading part, I’m rarely so critical.

This book, though, because you asked, was called, is called, something with archetypes. No, wait, something with Heroes. It’s about archetypes. Hang on, let me google it at amazon.

Awakening the Hero Within, it’s called.

Sorry if that link doesn’t work, I can’t be arsed to see if I copied it right.

I shop for books by walking down the aisle with a basket and buying whichever books jump in as I walk past. You know how some books find you? Reading this book, this is all new to me, this stuff. Maybe you are well-versed in archetypes and that sort of thing. I have been a Parcival fan for a long time, and the author mentions Parcival a lot. Same with the Grail legend. So I dig it on that level, it gets through to me in that way. Any psychology book, many of them discuss the same thing in different ways. What’s important is that a book gets through to you in your present situation. This one is getting through to me at the moment.

Speaking of psychology, my daughter had a job taking tickets at a local exhibition last weekend. We have both had that job when we were younger, too, good summer job, and Alpha and I both mentioned to her how lots of people would try to buffalo their way inside without tickets in one way or another. Beta is really hard-assed, though, and let only the cute boys in, and only the most charming of those.

Otherwise, she was officer Beta. She said a weekend on that job and you didn’t need to study psychology, you had already learned everything you would need in life.

So this book. The author says a few interesting things. She talks about the development of ego, self and soul as a journey, what she calls the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell gets mentioned. This and that. One of the interesting things she says is that the ego is the container for the other stuff learned and experienced along the journey, and that it must be developed before you can develop self and soul. And not, annihilate the ego and stuff. Not at first, any way.

Indeed, you have some of these spiritual disciplines, the ones that talk about doing away with the ego in one way or another; we sometimes forget that a lot of them are not in a big hurry to do that, though. You have to go through a long process before you reach that point.

This isn’t a book report. If that sounds like a book for you, take a look at it in the library or something. I’m only half done with it, but I’m still liking it.

At one point she mentions the Zen idea of doing one thing at a time. When you sweep, just sweep. Sweeping I can manage. Same with shoveling snow or digging a hole in the ground. When I do those things, I’m right there doing it and that’s all I’m doing.

Same with eating. When I eat, people always say I make it look so good. I’m not concentrating on eating, exactly. I’m just eating, period, all of me. Not just chewing with my mouth while I think about one thing and take a call on my cellphone and watch something else out the window.

But this whole idea falls apart when I think about taking a crap and reading the newspaper, because those two things so go together. I can’t possibly take a crap without reading the newspaper. Or: getting a talking-to from your wife and thinking about something else. How can you not do that? Or driving: if I was driving when I was driving, I’d remember more of the commute to work, I think. I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m driving, but it’s obviously not driving. I get to work and am all, how did I get here? You know that feeling?

On the other hand, there’s my daughter, taking tickets. Yesterday was the last day of the exhibition and some guy was trying to get inside without letting her tear his tickets. No idea what his plan was for the tickets, giving them to someone else so they could get inside too or something. He was yelling at my daughter, she said, insulting things, disparaging her ability to comprehend the situation, that sort of thing. When you’re 16, or a woman, people sometimes think they can buffalo you. But thing is about Beta, when she’s tearing tickets, she’s tearing tickets. So she tore off his ticket stubs and that was it.

It’s the ego development, I think. That’s one of the core things that I like about this book. Being grounded in a strong sense of self as a point of departure for everything else. Alpha and I were talking about Gamma and what a negotiator she is and how she often gets what she wants because she knows exactly what it is that she wants. And how a person who knows what they want is unstoppable to the extent of their ability and possibilities. And how that was always one of our parenting goals, to give our children strong egos and strong senses of self and strong knowledge of what they want and how it seems that we have been successful in that, only of course, who knows if it was due to anything we did that they turned out like that or if that’s just the way they turned out, independently of us?

Having for a good part of my life alternated between periods of low self-esteem and irritating grandiosity, I only recently realized that it’s possible to have both simultaneously.

In other news, whoever is responsible for that sort of thing announced recently that slug density hereabouts had reached a high of 75 m² (according to what a doctor friend told us when we picked Gamma up from a birthday party yesterday). Alpha and I took a walk along a creek down to the Danube yesterday and I can only say they were right.

That could be a real racket, couldn’t it. Slug counter.

Me: You guys have to read this book I’m reading, it’s really interesting.
Alpha: Pfff. Hah. Snicker.
Beta: Bwahahaha. Snicker.
Me: I say that about every book I read, don’t I.
Me: But anyway. Seriously, this one is really good.
Alpha: Yeah…
Beta: … yeah. Snort.

Your hand is palm-down on the table. My hand. My hand is palm-down on the table. On my forearm, near the elbow, a maggot is sticking out of my skin. I grasp it gently with my other hand and pull it out.

It doesn’t resist. It doesn’t hang on, that is. If I release the pressure, it starts sliding back in, though.

Pulling a maggot out of my arm is a good feeling. The idea that there is a maggot in your arm might be disturbing, but here I am pulling one out of my arm, which is a good thing. Completely positive.

The more I pull out, the bigger the maggot turns out to be. It’s not so much that it is growing, really; more like it was a lot bigger all along than I thought it was.

It’s a maggot as big as a ferret. Sort of pale blonde-white. Like two kilos of sentient fat. A guy from work who turns out to know a lot about maggots helps me pull it out. The more we pull out, the better I feel about it.

Nothing like getting rid of a big maggot.

This is fun.

Rain is my favorite weather, so I’m enjoying this summer so far. Of course, I have enough empathy to feel sorry for sun-lovers, in much the same way that I feel a little sorry for cannibals who are upset that it is illegal to eat people.

Whenever it rains as much as it has been lately, I am reminded of Rod Steiger on the surface of Venus in the film The Illustrated Man, based on the book by Ray Bradbury.

Besides being one of my favorite actors, Rod Steiger is also the best-connected actor in Hollywood (in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon sense) even better-connected than Kevin Bacon, for example, because has acted in so many different kinds of movies, according to someone who researched that.

And Bradbury was my favorite author when I was a kid devouring the sort of fiction he writes.

Anyway. Rain.

We had people over for dinner yesterday. Including a friend of Beta’s, whom we did not expect. As Gamma said to her two friends staying over, whom we also did not expect, “the French people are coming, and their friends, and their friends’ kids.” I think there were 14 of us. I stood outside in the rain and barbecued chicken satay, with the grill under the eaves of the house so the rain wouldn’t put out the coals. It made the side of the house a little hot but nothing caught on fire and the food was good.

Afterwards everyone played whatever musical instruments they played. Beta played the harp. A French girl played the piano. I put on a single-malt whiskey tasting thing for some of the guests, then I played my tin whistles.

Afterwards Beta broke boards with her fist. (Yesterday afternoon, preparing for our guests, we discovered that it’s fun to break boards with your fist. ) I don’t recommend doing this without proper supervision. I can just see someone punching an oak board against the grain and breaking their wrist. Impressed her little sister and her friends.