1. Quote of the day from the Small Wingnut:

“I need to do something with that black marker. I’m gonna do serious monkeying around with it.”

(Yes, I am writing these down because they are so awesome.)

2. I started book number 2 by the aforementioned well-known author, and OMG, she has just introduced a character who is the spitting image, so far at least, of her husband, i.e. my college acquaintance. Soooooo strange.

BTW: If you want to know who she is, I will email you.

Eliza explains the plot of one of the Madagascar movies:

“There’s the part where they get stuck and there’s the part where things happen and there’s other parts, too.”

Hey. At least I’m not regaling you with tales of the midlife malaise occasioned by the depression selection of mompants living in my closet right now. As some sort of manifestation of how past it I am feeling right now, I keep thinking I’m a couple years older than I am. 

I decided sort of by accident to try not to buy any purses or shoes for at least a year, and I’ve achieved the former and am doing well on the latter (which does include an exemption for running shoes since I would prefer not to cripple myself), but I think it may be time to buy some new pants.

Khakis are killing my soul! 

***

What I really need to tell you about is how much I adore my karate class right now. One of the things that I love about teaching is learning people’s stories.

One of my students is a mom who started with both of her sons, and I thought it was the kids who were the driving force; she seemed too, I don’t know, polite, somehow, for karate. I couldn’t have been more wrong: The kids seemed to lose interest, but she kept coming, and she’s started to do that thing that some of us get where we’re cheerful and friendly before class but then we bow in and we do NOT fuck around. 

Then a few weeks ago, I learned that actually, one of the kids wanted to keep coming, but she redirected him into another activity instead so that she can come alone. She told me that as a girl, she was such a wild child that people mistook her for a boy well into her teens (given her cultural background, I am in awe imagining the strength of character it took to be like that as well as the worried whispered nighttime conversations between her parents) . She and her brothers took karate lessons, became enamored of board breaking, and she was pulled out of the class by her freaked-out mom after she broke (successfully) the circuit board of her HOUSE with her bare hands. 

Then there’s the dad who is so invested in making sure his kid absorbs the lessons of karate that he’s doing everything right. A lot of parents who really want their kids to do something, they just push and push and if the kid wants to stop, they push harder and bribe until the whole enterprise breaks down in tears and shouting. He’s trying so hard to be hands-off and let his son set the pace, and his pay-off comes in moments like yesterday, before class, when they decided, together, to show up 10 minutes early to practice blocks.

From the moment he first walked in with his kid, he projected an intensity that told me he is one of those people who embraces martial arts because he doesn’t want to use it, ever. He talked of a friend whose dojo competes, and how that’s not what he’s after, and then a passing reference to managing his anger told me I was on the right track. Sensei (whose multifarious career includes policing and prison outreach) met him, took one look at his tattoos when he met him and told me the guy was likely an ex-gang-member who’d done prison time. The tzitzit he wears (I’m not that erudite, I just googled “jewish tassels”) tell me more about how serious he is about finding his right path for the sake of this boy, who bears his name and so clearly looks up to him. It is so cool to me that my class is something this guy turns to in his journey away from whatever’s in his past.

There’s a girl and her mom who have been coming for a little while, and initially, the mom did something a lot of moms do: they come up to me before class and tell me they’re here because their offspring wanted to come, but they have an injury/are sick/have their period and will probably not be participating too much, like they’re hedging against looking and feeling stupid. I kid not — this has happened at least a half-dozen times so far. Every so often, though, I get one who says that and then kind of squares her shoulders and does it anyway and lets go of feeling stupid long enough to discover that really, she feels awesome doing this.

And so now, she’s more committed than her daughter, who is a lovely, bright presence but is, frankly, unteachable right now thanks to a combination of tweener-dom, too-smart-for-her-own-good-ness and the world’s shortest attention span. But they want to keep coming and I will get over my frustration over not even getting her to punch correctly because the girl is having fun and the mom practically knows the kata and they are having fun together and I’ve seen kids come out the other side of tweening and laser-lock onto their practice with a focus you never knew they had in them.

Yesterday, two gay dads and their daughter came for the first time and I am crossing all appendages that they come back, because I am wildly curious to learn their story. One of them has about twice as much martial arts experience as I do and made reference to living in Thailand and Hawaii. The other is a total novice and clearly some sort of academic, and I kind of want to kidnap their amazing daughter so she can be Eliza’s big sister. Seriously, I am dying of curiosity.

As part of our economic re-adjustment, Jim now works Sundays, which left me and Eliza at loose ends for the day. I’d planned an outing to an annual variety show in Hipsterville, but she ix-nayed that in favor of a new dinosaur exhibit. Yep, offered the choice between dancing poodles and robot dinosaurs, my kid voted the straight nerd ticket. 

The trip there was full of win because Saturday, we bought her a new booster seat. She was about to outgrow her car seat and also the old car seat was getting on my nerves. She was super-on-board with this change, especially when she found out that the booster has these little slide-out cupholders. As I emailed my mom, she insisted on filling the one with snacks and the other with a water bottle for the arduous trek.

At the science museum I attempted to take a leisurely stroll through the exhibits, but the kid was all, “Forward, MARCH!” for the robo-dinos.

This is not her first experience with them; this museum we belong to plays host annually to cheesy little exhibits, sort of life-size dioramas with plastic flowers and painted-sheet backdrops, wherein stand faux rexes and such, making most un-dino-ish whirring and clicking noises as they shift from pose to pose.

Museum goers were greeted, in this case, with a t-rex baring its teeth. Most parents ended up hustling their terrified, quivering-lipped kiddos quickly past the display, but mine thought rexy was neat! “I want to say hello,” she said, and spent about 5 minutes waving at/communing with him while the guard snickered:

“I think she wants to take him home,” I said to one mother who saw us and cracked up.

“Not much difference between a dinosaur and a pony,” she said.

“Potato, Potahto,” I agreed.

Even the zebra got short shrift, and that, my friends, is saying something, because after the museum we went to the mall where we somehow ended up wandering through the prom dresses at JCPenneys for 15 minutes, picking out our favorites. Eliza’s tastes are decidedly louche, as she favored the animal print microminis over all but the sparkliest pink dresses.

But back to museum for a minute, I had a moment of feeling the winds of time vis-a-vis science over my lifetime. When I was a kid and obsessing over dinos myself, archeopteryx and his ilk were still, in the conventional science wisdom, seen as maybe-could-it-be connected to dinosaurs. This exhibit explicitly explored that connection, and by now the science has accumulated enough that birds are seen as definitely having evolved from dinos — in fact, a flow chart in this exhibit went so far as to suggest that they could be seen as a part of the reptile world, like, here’s the crocodiles that evolved from ancient crocs, here’s the turtles that evolved from ancient turtles, and here’s the birds that evolved from dinos. The college I attended has a world-renowned collection of dino footprints, and the scientist who started said collection some 150 years ago thought that he was collecting the prints of ancient birds. He spent several decades being wrong, and now he’s right again!