Oh, HAI!

How are you! I am a GOAT! I am also very inquisitive! I like to snack on people’s shirt and pants and shoes! I am hogging your camera! You should give me FOOD! Oh, never mind, I don’t want to eat, I just want to invade your personal SPACE!

Did I say HELLO yet? HELLO! Mmmm. You SMELL interesting!

I would also like to talk to you about the lady in this picture! The one with the small blond person who is hanging out with my friend Ramona! Isn’t Ramona’s bandana awesome!

Ramona thinks she is a little strange! Ramona says the lady kept referring to her as a girl! Which she is! But then the lady’s friend asked her how she knew! And the lady said she read Ramona’s nametag and that’s how! And then she said, “And also, she has goat hooters!” and pointed at Ramona’s privates! WTF SO INAPPROPRIATE!

Anyway, she is a MENACE! She keeps running after our friends and threatening to put them in her purse and take them home with her!

WTF ARE WE CHIHUAHUAS! NO! ARE NOT PURSEDOGS!

Sorry. We got excited.

Anyway, lady wants one of these for Christmas:

Nono, the GOAT BABY, not the human baby. Human baby is already hers. See:

Insanity is clearly inheritable trait, BTW.

Lady also wants furry sheep (?) thing.

Is not so sure about llama. Llama sad now, just wants to be friends, but lady and man-person are all, we don’t trust you, you spit!

Bigots.

Grandma Texas has claimed for herself the privilege of buying Eliza various special-occasion outfits, including the first-day-of-camp and first-day-of-school outfits of the past year and a half. 

This year, mindful of the zebra dress kerfuffle of January, instead of buying it for us, she footed the bill while Eliza and I went on a virtual shopping trip at LL Bean. She had anticipated that the girlchild would pick the pretty cardigan and the flowery dresses, and the only stipulation that it please dear god not be pastel pink.

As you can see from the below, Eliza followed said stipulation to the letter, if not in spirit — but the outfit itself was quite a surprise. There was no hesitation, either. I pulled up the website and she pointed at the skirt/shirt combo and said, “I want THAT one!” My off-hand comment that the skirt had Scottie dogs embroidered on it only reinforced her decision. 

My mom finds it hysterical that she picked a rugby shirt. I’m not sure that the shirt and skirt match despite the LL Bean website’s assurances to the contrary. I am just hoping that the renegade choice of tights ties it all together somehow. As for the clogs, oh dear lord, I think we have a new enlistee in Dansko Nation.

The outfit arrived yesterday and this morning I let her try it on. Great was her delight when we discovered that not only were there Scotties on the skirt, they were wearing little green and pink doggie sweaters. Then she clomped downstairs so we could show Daddy her new outfit. Ostensibly, this was for fashion show, but mostly, I didn’t want her bamboozling Jim into letting her wear her outfit before the appointed day, which she has a habit of doing, so I figured if he knew what the outfit components were, it would reduce the chances of said trickery. 

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In case you are wondering if something is wrong with my camera, she is that big. The child has grown 2 inches this summer.

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She has also become very inventive about toys she doesn’t have. She has friends who have a Wii, and she loves to play air hockey. She has thus far constructed 2 pretend Wiis and this morning we played pretend air hockey. 

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Eliza has this (hideous) stuffed dog that I won for her years ago at a fair, whom she has named Lula. Lately, she is always talking about Lula’s incredible adventures going to fairs and concerts and playing Wii and so on. But she’s not actually playing with the dog when she tells us these things. So it’s like the stuffed animal is the avatar of her imaginary friend.

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I am thankful that she seems to have inherited Jim’s musical skills rather than mine. The other day we visited a former colleague of his, whose wife teaches piano. Seeing Eliza greedily eyeing the instrument, she consented to let her play. Eliza’s playing is mostly of the free-style jazz variety, but the woman showed her how to hold her hands and played her a CD of some variations on Twinkle Twinkle. As the piano teacher and I chatted about her work, we suddenly realized that the girlchild was trying to pick out the melody. She wasn’t getting them exactly right, but we could tell she’d figured out, OK, this is a little higher, that note’s a little lower. My jaw hit the floor — the ability to pick out a melody has been a skill of Jim’s that I’ve long envied, and I’m so pleased she seems to have it too.

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This morning, she picked up her kid-size guitar, whanged out a loud, dissonant chord, and said, “That’s the start of Hard Day’s Night.” It wasn’t, exactly, but her Beatlemania never ceases to amuse and amaze me. Ringo’s her favorite.

Last night I had that running dream. You know the one, where you’re running as fast as you can while something or someone is chasing you.

The difference was that this one was exhilarating, because I won. 

Ironically, my run this morning was lousy, but this is not the discouragement it once was, because, as evidenced by that dream, I have hit a stage with my running where it feels like something I do. 

This is not to say, mind you, that I am particularly fast, but that lacing up my sneakers and bounding down the hill near my street is just one of those things I do. I experience that weird combination of nonchalance and gratitude that I often feel about karate, where I can’t remember not being able to execute this particular task because it’s so a part of me, but with the same breath I revel in the fact that I have this beautiful skill at my command.

So now, I have this hare-brained idea of running the Hartford Half-Marathon. 

My training is somewhat slapdash, because instead of running 4 days a week, I train karate four days and run the other three. I skimp on the long runs the training schedule requires because of work/karate/kid/life, but it can’t be helped, and so I am going to rely on a combination of actual skill and “&^%^& that &$#$%, I’m not giving up now!” to get me to the finish line. 

In karate, I feel like I’m in deeper than I ever was. Being one of the people making the decisions about the philosophical as well as logistical decisions about the place has a way of pulling you in deeper. That guy is ready to test, but his fellow rank members aren’t: Do we reward his spirit, or will singling him out create disunity in the rank that outweighs the benefits of keeping him motivated? How many levels of kids can we stick in the same class without turning it into a big cat-herding operation? Are that dude’s ideas challenging or undermining our practice? How do we respect the legacy of our sensei but forge our own path?

What must it be like for our sensei to have turned the thing over to us, knowing that we needed to do this to move forward — and at the same time know that he has to sit there and watch while we figure it all out while he has the answers he can’t and won’t give us. I imagine it’s not unlike watching my kid make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wondering exactly why there needs to be peanut butter on that chair there but knowing that if I don’t let her put peanut butter on that chair, she will never come to an understanding of why perhaps it doesn’t belong there. Only, you know, with a dojo.

I hope we haven’t smeared too much metaphorical peanut butter on the chair.

I think, in fact, that we’re doing OK. Certainly, it’s exciting for us, and I am getting home much too late from class lately because we lollygag for a half hour afterwards discussing the merits of aerobic versus anaerobic training and figuring out the exact right ratio of supporting and pushing to get the newbies to stop treating the abdominal workout like naptime.

The new shihan (head sensei in charge of karate) asked me what I wanted to work on and I told him I want bigger partners. I was not suicidal at the time. The thing is that we usually try self-defense applications out on people our own size and generally female to female because walloping someone of the opposite sex in the groin is awkward and because when you start, the male-female thing can feel really scary and weird because girls are supposed to be pleasant and polite and trying to hit a boy is JUST NOT DONE.

This societal conditioning has been incredibly difficult to move past. I can be all over a woman my size like white on rice in a fight. However, I’m not going to be attacked by a polite 5′7″ chick. Moreover, there’s stuff we do just doesn’t work if you’re the (smaller) girl defending against the (bigger) guy; moves that are terribly elegant in the abstract but that don’t work in a fight. Doesn’t mean the move or the discipline is ineffective, but that I need to be active in seeking out what does work. 

Last week the teacher tried to make the girls pair up to practice a technique and I said, “No, I want to do this with the kind of opponent I would have in real life.”

I realized anew that generosity can come in many guises, and I also realized again that one of the thing I like about karate is that I know virtually nothing about the man beyond his name, but my opponent allowed me to pull his hair and elbow him in the gut and step on his knee and took genuine delight in my beaming smile when I put everything together and he ended up in what looked like an extreme yoga posture on the floor.

POP QUIZ:

1. Things I saw in the pit at a Bruce Springsteen concert last night that do not belong there:

• A girl wearing a pearl necklace
• Slushy alcohol drinks
• A sense of cool and/or ironic detachment
• All of the above

2. You will probably leave a Bruce Springsteen concert thinking the world needs more of the following:

• Accordion battles
• Saxophonists who wear gold nail polish
• Musicians who have no sense of cool and/or ironic detachment
• All of the above

3. Members of the E Street Band look like (you may use the image above as a basis for your answer):

• Math teachers
• Pirates
• As though they had stuck their finger in a live socket
• All of the above

4. True or false: If you are 70-year-old-ish, and you insist on being in the pit with 1,400 other people on a 95-degree day in an un-air-conditioned venue and eventually pass out cold from same, your fellow concert-goers will scream your name and raise their fists in tribute to you, their fallen comrade, as you are wheeled off (having regained consciousness and protesting vociferously) by paramedics.

5 (a). Please evaluate Bruce Springsteen’s new hairdo. Do you detect the influence of Morrissey in its quiff-like proportions, or is its more prominent antecedent the styles of the French Revolution era? Use examples to back up your work and base your answer on the image below. 

5 (b): What the hell is under Steve’s bandana?

6. Essay question. Agree or disagree; support your argument with examples: Outlaw Pete is wickedly funny, an awesome appropriation of the hook from KISS’s I Was Made For Lovin’ You, and makes excellent use of props including a cowboy hat:

7. Bruce Springsteen has finally played I’m On Fire at a concert you attended. You can now:

• Die happy
• Stop going to Springsteen shows since you have achieved your goal
• Set your sights on a new goal, like, say, Drive All Night

8. Ethics question: Is it hypocritical to make fun of the scrum of chicks who swarmed Bruce during Dancing in the Dark when you had, two songs previously, contemplated launching yourself over 4 rows of people so you could strum his guitar during Born to Run?

Extra credit: Is this a gratuitous picture?

I posted something I thought was cute but then I realized that if you don’t know our family dynamics from the inside it read like a disaster. So, never mind.

The Y caught fire today and so I have no idea what is going to happen to my karate class which starts up in a few weeks. Karate is really different lately, now that I’m on the policy-setting end of things; but ironically, because I’m on the policy-setting side of things, I feel less free to talk. Lucky Jim, he gets the lectures instead.

Our Friday Night Lights obsession continues unabated, and we’ve gotten so sucked in its not even funny. Jim has a love-hate relationship with Tim Riggins. “Can’t they see he’s just doing his used-car-salesman thing?” he asked me one night as Riggins charmed the pants off yet another woman. But then the next night when Lyla Garrity broke his heart again, there was Jim, muttering “Man, that was COLD,” at the computer screen.

Meanwhile, I stifled a snicker when I took Eliza to Children’s Place and saw they had number 33 football shirts for kids there. I suspect it’s coincidence but I wondered if I could squeeze into the biggest size.

I ran a bunch last weekend and it went well, thanks largely to the running I did in Texas which reset my system stress meters. Insert tedious treatise about perspective, pushing oneself, blah blah.

I am attending a Kings of Leon concert in a few weeks and am trying to put together the perfect outfit — you know, the one that will make Caleb Followill say, “Hey, old lady: come here.” I will probably just end up in jeans and a t-shirt, though, which is just as well since I haven’t gotten a Marital Exemption for Followill et al from Jim.

I wrote thing about some bread I baked and woo, baking, it’s not that hard; you’ve read this before.

In other words, still here, still doing all the same stuff, still reading, waiting for something exciting to tell you.