Monday, August 20, 2007
ManCakes: The Legend Is Born
Yes yes yes, the weekend was fun, the weekend was fine, thanks for asking. The wedding was beautiful, from my vantage shut up in my uncle’s house where I escaped with the other parents-of-two-year-olds-who-couldn’t-be-silenced; the food was delicious; and we wound up making an unintentional trade of a pair of my sister’s crocs for a theater-sports logo shirt, the former of which got left behind and the latter of which got stuffed, inadvertently, I suspect, in one of our party-clothes bags. Zach got to swim in a pool for, I think, the second or third time, and had a shrieking blast. All in all, a very nice day – the centerpiece of a very nice weekend with my mom and sister and her family. Yay.
I have not much time to update you more than that, and really I’ve put off a lot of my writing as I spent my last few weeks on the bus copy-editing a monograph on “Modalities for the Maintenance of Public Order and Public Safety in Medieval Jewish Law (with a brief ((!!)) Excursus : Human Rights, Kavod Habrioth, and Kavod Ha’adam“ (you know better than to think I’m kidding). I’m done with it now so I can move back to the essay about kaleidoscopes, or the nice lady who cleans up at my cube at night. Ergo, Chuckles ahoy, but not so many a-here and now.
Meantime, here’s a brief freshie for those who hunger: I’ve had some challenges over my past lifetime trying to come up with a nickname for myself. Some folk try to stick me with one; they never seem right. I even tried to make one up but it always felt forced; every time I brought it out I was asked to justify it and I really just couldn’t. But now, I think I’ve finally turned the nickname corner.
On Saturday I made my traditional breakfast – pancakes, gussied up. (FYI it was another dose of blueberry-banana with cardamom, coriander and cinnamon.) They were big and tasty and the kids loved’em. My sister mentioned something about my “Massive pancakes;” my twisted mind immediately sought the spoonerization and I uttered, barely consciously, something about my “passive mancakes.” And then the epiphany hit: “Passive mancakes” is almost the same series of sounds as constitutes my last name, and “mancakes” is a damn fine thing to be called, if one is to be called something other than one’s own name.
SO: nicknameage has been established and confirmed. You can call me Dan, or any variation thereof; you can call me Esquire, Commodore or Late For Dinner – but if you want to call me by my nickname, you now must call me Mancakes. Passive or not, it’s who I am from now on. My relief is palpable. My passivity is yet to be determined.
