Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Man Who Kept Busy
To paraphrase the classics, welcome back, my friends, to the blog that takes a licking but keeps on… um… doing whatever it is that blogs do. Which is, at the moment, more than I can say for myself. I’ve bogged down again in terms of writing anything worth your time, so feel free to skip to the links page or that viagra ad you’ve been wondering about. Or maybe it was that pill for hot flashes. Choose your poison before it chooses you.
Speaking of which, yes, I’m self-critical for failing YET AGAIN to sweep you off your desk chair with an essay of poignant beauty, like that one I’m almost done with about the seaside mishap I saw in Monterey. However, to be honest with myself (if with no one else) I have an excuse: I been busy.
Sure, you grumble understandably, we’re all busy. But you finished writing an opera, ran for senate, invented phlogiston, and broke a teen star’s heart. While qualifying for an Olympic team (even if it’s just biathalon). Now *that’s* busy. What’s my ostensible excuse?
Good question, rhetorical jerk in my head - I’ll tells ya. It’s tuesday, right? Sorta late? Let’s see where I’ve been since you last heard from me (in a post I will refrain from recognizing as equal in lameness to this one):
SATURDAY: the lord’s day, for the hebrew folk. Kel had a hair appointment, a medical appointment, and an appointment with the giant megastore down in Colma, so Zach and I went to the Irish bakery and then to the playground, where I gave him one of his two little Irish shortbread cookies. This instigated a screaming tantrum that lasted nearly an hour as he demanded his second cookie. I eventually dragged him home (wish I was kidding) and fed him some nutritious lunch (an eggle with roast turkey and melted cojak cheese, if you must know). I diverted him from his cookie with the television, which I considered a tradeoff between evil and eeevilll, and took a few minutes to post something bloggish - then I actually napped for 20 minutes, went out and got burritos for our supper, and watched Munich to round off the day. Believe it or not, that was a whole day’s worth of activity and no I’m not proud. So unproud, in fact, that -
SUNDAY: the lord’s day for roundheads and papish alike. I woke up in the living room (having been driven from my bed by a snoring child who had tantrumed out again at 2 am) and switched back to my bed for another hour of shuteye which I desperately needed, and still found myself up and alert by 7 freaking 30 a.m., at which time I realized we had no eggs in the house so I could not make pancakes. This was a serious crimp in my sunday schedule, friends. I fell back on cleaning the house, doing laundry, washing dishes, and a few minutes of playing with the boy - an activity which is being increasingly demanded of me, and which is in turn demanding increasing amounts of energy, patience, and nard-guarding. But by ten a.m. we were driving out to Yerba Buena to visit the opening day of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a Liebsiend-designed repurposing of an old power substation which was itself designed by one of SF’s best architects of the post-quake era, Willis “wachu tokinbout” Polk. It’s a gorgeous structure with big blue cubes jutting out of the west side into Yerba Buena alley, where the Mexican Museum and Arts&Crafts museum and Papa Beard Creampuff shop are located. We cruised through the exhibits more quickly than I’d have preferred, but a bit more slowly than Zach wanted, which is the essence of compromise. Highlights included a very disorienting soundscape in a vertiginous gallery with slanted walls and ceilings, a keno-type display called “Playing God” that let you pick random creation-oriented quotes (mine was “All Creatures Must Work For Their Food"), a trippy circular screen set flat like a well in which multicolored texts in english and hebrew swirled down into a vortex, and a great exhibit of drawings by the guy who invented Schrek. We stepped back outside in time for lunch, which we bought at the local AG Ferrari deli and which we consumed at the serene, underutilized fountain garden at the east end of Yerba Buena, across the street from SFMOMA. From there we wandered over to the main part of YB Gardens to listen to a cool afro-fusion jazz quintet while Z charged up and down the ramps and stairways until he remembered that there was an actual playground across the street, which we then visited so he could ride the big tunnelslide and run around the hedge maze and balance on low brick walls and generally burn off a lot of kid energy. By now it was after three so we wandered back to the car (by way of a fro-yo place where I accidentally bashed Z’s head into the ceiling, hey these things happen) and then back home for MOAR laundry, a run in GG park (lungs remained within pleural cavity - whoo-hoo!), a quick shower and then a walk with Z to a produce market and a shop where beer was purchased. Home again, I cooked a truly delightful supper of pan-seared, lightly-crusted tilapia loin (gotta love them loins), with quinoa and freshly-shucked sweet peas. By this time it was time to bathe Z and to surf the net in a quiet stupor while K got him to sleep, which didn’t work at all - he re-tantrumed himself sufficiently to enbloody his own nose, so we hosed him (and his bear) off and I traded places with Kel, finally getting him to sleep shortly before 11. And that was enough for me.
Monday Z got two cavities filled first thing in the a.m., and then we played madly in the playground till he’d broken all the toys he’d gotten for being such an amazingly well-behaved young man in the drill-chair. We then made a quick trip to House of Bagels for a sprinkle-cookie and then headed home again where I made Z some banana slices with pumpkin butter and I had a tilapia loin sandwich which Z significantly shared with me. We had settled down for a few minutes of Finding Nemo when Kel got back from work and I headed out for my own half-day at the office. I got home late, had a tasty salmon, sauteed carrot and Israeli couscous supper, bathed Z, and cleaned up till Kel had him asleep. Then she and I watched a new Venture Brothers cartoon and went to sleep ourselves. (At some point there was a return to our own bed, but I don’t have the details clearly in mind.)
Today we got out of the house at 7:30. I dropped Z at day care (he’s been accepted at his preschool and will start at the end of the month so it’s all very bittersweet now), rode the bus to work, checked in and confirmed lack of overnight disasters, and then rode the bus back home because I’d forgotten my gym clothes. Rode back, worked worked worked, had some salmon salad for lunch, worked worked worked, went out and got an agua fresca ("sandia" flavah) and worked worked again, and then finally left for a yoga class out at Haight and Divis (hence the gym clothes). It was a good class and I was well-warmed by the time I got to the bus stop on Divis for the ride up to Geary. That lasted about 15 minutes, and 15 minutes after that I started walking in an increasingly chilly evening, wearing no jacket of course. I got home at nearly 9, cobbled together a bit of leftover supper, supported Kel as she, exhausted, concluded that Z’s tantrum required him to sleep in our bed tonight, returned to my supper, watched Top Chef (tonight’s winning dish: day-old couscous stirred into out-of-a-carton tomato soup, with fake-buttered toast and a cold refreshing beer), and now I’m here frittering away my few hours available for sleeping while I update you on my pathetic excuse for a life. And as I do so, I keep hearing the mournful, lonesome sound of a trainwhistle, hooting its way through the night. It’s a comforting sound, except that there are no trains anywhere around here and I find it very strange that their whistles seem nearby. No, it’s not a boat whistle. Yes, I know the difference. Maybe they put the train on a boat. You figure it out.
Sounds like enough, no? NO? Then let me bounce a bit of news off your screen, blog-daddy: Zach’s gonna have a brother soon. We’ve been in process for another adoption since January 07 and we got our referral just a few weeks ago. A baby boy waits for us in Korea and we’ll go there sometime in the autumn. Some of my spare time over the past few days has also been taken up with some of those details. And if that doesn’t back you off your “shoulda posted a real essay” ‘tude, well my friend, I guess you’ll just have to be disappointed with me. The line forms out the door. And when you come back, bring a new child seat for the Forester. Disappointment is a two-way street, but both directions require the installation of appropriate safety devices.
