breaking bad

FTR, I am ripping through these episodes like a, well, like an addict or something. (Thank you Netflix, you're such an enabler.)

And I love it. Not least because it makes me miss those gorgeous views of the Sandias I got to enjoy those brief summers I got to live in ABQ.

But two things really irk me.

First. Yes, this is highly personal and has to do with the constant, chronic and let's just own up to it, debilitating sleep deprivation I'm currently experiencing (the number of record screw-ups in the last few weeks! like, leaving my phone on the hood of the car, and misreading my own course schedule re the midterm date). I am so utterly pissed off at the way in which TV pregnancies, births, and babycare are depicted. The Whites are supposed to be living on a teacher's salary, and yet Skyler has a maternity wardrobe that never repeats itself? Come on. I will admit that the whole birth sequence was less annoying than is typical. No ridiculous scenes of women lying prone in hospital beds, screaming, cursing their spouses, and demanding immediate medication. But what's really bugging me at the moment, at episode 29, is that Baby Holly is the world's most autonomous, care-free infant. It's just No Big Thang to load her up and take her along to the bookkeeping office, where of course, she does nothing to interrupt getting work done. (I have yet to make good on my intention to book some office hours at NBTS with Baby Z in tow, and I struggle to do my course prep on a laptop on the living room floor beside her jumper contraption thing. It's pretty difficult to write a coherent lecture in 15-minute blocks of time interrupted more or less regularly by various demands for attention.) And at the hospital vigil? "Where's Holly?"/"I got a sitter." Right. Because it's No Big Thang to first, find a sitter, and second, feel completely comfortable leaving your newborn infant in someone else's hands for an extended and indefinite period of time. WTF. But for TV this is typical. The moment the drama of seeing the hotties morph into hot mamas with their baby bellies stuck onto curiously otherwise unmodified female frames (and then of course, morph smoothly right back to "normal" afterward...no postpartum bods to be found on American television), and the drama of the unexpected public waterbreaking and screaming cursing medicated hospital-practice-dictated birth sequence is done...well, the baby's just not that interesting, and stories about people who function just above zombie level due to the intense energy drain that is actual care of a real infant just don't cut it. So TV babies are magical--they don't need feeding, certainly not breastfeeding, (oh the logistical horror of negotiating that on a TV show, right?), and they don't require any actual interaction on an ongoing basis. A symbolic bottle waved in the air, a symbolic diaper change--and then they disappear from the viewer's sight. You'd forget that they exist, except for the perfunctory references to them here and there in the dialogue. And all this from a show that, really, does a better than usual job on this stuff. SIGH. It makes me want to tear my hair out, but Baby Z's already regularly doing this for me.

And second, I was so totally struck by Walt's line to Jesse re the airplane crash: "I blame the government." The irony of this willingness to pin something like this on the government just blows me away, in this context where Breaking Bad as a narrative wouldn't even exist if Walt's cancer treatments weren't completely inaccessible for financial reasons. There's plenty of personal moral failure here, but really, on some level...I blame the government.

and in case you were wondering, this is the next little project we'll be undertaking: http://babytoolkit.blogspot.com/2007/12/clear-unsightly-blemishes-case-of.html

I'll keep y'all posted on whether or not I have as much success with the acne cream + sunlight solution to the ballpoint penned doll face issue.

Today I got my first open-mouthed, total shock reaction from someone when I said I was moving to Newark.

I've always hated the way every housecleaning product on the market is sold by smiling women who wipe, mop, sanitize, launder, spray, freshen up and scrub down everything in their shiny happy homes so that their children don't eat germs from raw chicken off the countertops and noone has to suffer from garbage can stink.

But I really really hate these Electrolux commercials with Kelly Ripa.



things I have learned this week

1. you can't assume the people on the sidewalks talking to themselves are crazy anymore.
2. there is such a thing as too much whipped cream in an espresso con panna.
3. you can find free knitting patterns for Barbies on the internet (don't worry, I have a subversive master plan at work here. and when I get my hands on a Ken, s/he's getting a makeover for sure).
4. the new name of the Childlike Empress in NeverEnding Story? "Moon Child."
5. Einstein was a mad genius at baby-killing rationalizations.

and you?

Soundcheck on cyborgs & music

summer: a busy of monotony

So, it's summer. And I like summer: I like hot weather, I like being outside, I like the idea of "vacation," I like hanging out with Clare (mostly) (and this mostly reciprocated). But arrrrrrrgh.

Because "vacation" is theoretical, it's been hellishly hot here just like it has everywhere else, and it seems like I've been on my own more the past two months than any stretch of time so far in a decade of marriage. It's a big deal just to extricate myself from Clare's proximity long enough to go pee, and generally, she scouts me out while I'm still mid-stream.

In an hour and a half, I will have some much-needed time to do some pressing and important work--my Science for Ministry elective course, "The Human Person in a Technological Age," starts Monday. I am counting the minutes. This blog post is happening only because I am delaying the inevitable trip to the playground while my iPhone rewrites itself from scratch (no idea why this is necessary but it is taking forever).

In other news, I remain a theologian-at-large and heretic-for-hire, so if there's anyone you know in need of faithfully irreverent God-talk...well, I could use some word-of-mouth buzz. It would be so nice, and not just for practicalities like paying student loans, to do work I actually get paid for.

Time for the playground!

unHappy Meal

Warning: this is going to be one of those miscellaneous, personal complaint posts. But honestly...just wait till you hear this!

So, Sunday morning, after working through some massive attitudinal issues with Clare, we rendezvoused with Ally and Jarrod and kids at 4th Avenue CofC in Franklin, and had a lovely morning there. Not least because I was agreeably surprised to listen to a sermon on the necessity of creative non-violence! Which is lovely in itself but also relevant to what follows.

After church, it began to rain and so we revised our lunch intentions to take the kids to McDonalds so they could run around on the inside playground area. And while I am no fan of McD's, this is a compromise I am willing to make on occasion because it's way better than the consequences of three restless kids unable to play outside all day. So, we walk in and the kids immediately join a beautiful girl about Clare's age at the toy display and start identifying which one they want, which causes some kind of ruckus with Clare who starts bawling for reasons I have to try to figure out and satisfactorily address, which I do. Then we hustle them off forthwith to playground area before any more hungry energy causes another ruckus, and then I go to the counter to order. There's a couple standing in an ambiguous place, not quite in line or at the counter but standing around sort of in the general area, hanging back, so I ask, "are y'all in line?" and they say no, so I get in line behind my bro-in-law and place my order right after him. As we're clearly together they put our trays up and start putting stuff on them, six adult meals and six kids meals all together. Then I notice a little bottle of milk, which I'd ordered for Clare, right next to my tray, and I think, why isn't this on my tray? So I start to take it but then I notice it's chocolate, which I didn't want, so I put it down and consider whether it is worth pointing out the mistake and asking for plain milk. While I'm pondering this they put a kids meal sack on the counter and announce "cheeseburger" which I'd heard Jarrod order for Levi, so I pick it up to hand to Jarrod. And out of nowhere this blond woman comes up, practically shoulder tackles me, snatches it away and says, "That's ours, and thanks for putting your hands all over it," in a super nasty voice.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I am absolutely supremely unobservant and often almost comically stereotypically professorishly absentminded, so, it shouldn't surprise you that the obvious 2 + 2 here that these were not our items totally did not occur to me. From my point of view, it wasn't at all obvious, and even in retrospect, I feel like there was some logic to my mistake. And of course, as she said, "this is ours," I immediately handed it to her and started to say, "oh I'm sorry, here you go," but she talked right over that instinctive reply with the nasty "thanks for putting your hands all over it" as she stalks off. So I'm greatly astonished, but, like the moment with the lady in the grocery store parking lot, I'm no longer one to let these things go by internalizing shame or accepting the notion that somehow I deserve to be treated like shit. So I try again with an innocent and sincere, "I'm sorry," but she snaps back with the same nasty statement, and I say (not particularly conciliatory here), "Look, lady, I was nice to you, I even asked if you were in line, what's your problem?" But she just walks off.

I turn back around, and the employees behind the counter, who got a free front row ticket to this drama, are all looking at me and at each other with big round eyes and shrugged shoulders. One of them even said out loud, "what was that about?!" And the girl putting our order together grinned at us a few minutes later and said, "Now, I just want you to know, I'm putting my hand into this bag to put your food in it, I'm touching your food, hope that's okay," and as I left she said to me, "I mean, I'm pregnant and hormonal and I don't act like that!"

Of course, it was too much to hope that we would sit on opposite sides of the place where we could easily ignore each other. Turns out they chose a table right next to where we'd plonked down our stuff already. So, I felt like it would be remiss of me to not attempt some sort of reconciliation with this blonde nutjob. And I did my best--after all, I felt bad about calling her "lady" which is very dismissive. Plus, it had occurred to me that maybe she was pissed about something else--maybe she had seen Clare do something to her little girl while they were swarming around the toy display, and maybe there was something actually problematic that needed to be addressed, which I should know about but somehow missed.

So I approach the table, and before I even open my mouth, this woman rolls her eyes and says to her husband, "OMG, can you believe this?" So I say, "I'm sorry to interrupt your meal, but I feel like I just don't know what I might hve done to offend you, so I'd like to say that I'm sorry but I sortof need you to tell me what to actually apologize for." And she's interrupting every few words of this simple statement to say, over and over, in that same nasty tone, clipping off the ends of her words, "I--don't--want--to--talk--to--YOU."

So I give up, because she's a brick wall and not even hearing that I truly am trying to figure out what the problem is, because clearly, she's got some sort of massive problem with me. But as quickly as I turn away, I turn back again, because this is so absurd and so totally unsatisfactory. And I begin again with acknowledging that I am interrupting their time together, and sorry for that, but in case she missed it, I am genuinely trying to apologize. "What is it that I did?" I say, and stops her robotic litany of "I don't want to talk to you" to say, as if she can't believe she has to explain it, "you TOUCHED the BAG." And I said, "really? That's it. Really? Okay, then I guess I'd like to say that I'm sorry for touching the bag." But she's gone back to the "I don't want to talk to you" thing, and so I just can't manage to filter out my last comment.

"But you know, I do wash my hands after I pee."

Oh, the irony of listening to a sermon on creative non-violence and walking into this crap. I think I failed to remember the take-home phrase, "don't hit back." But honestly...as Anne Shirley would plead..."if only you knew how many things I want to say and don't."

A final irony: we're all sitting there letting our kids romp around the plastic wonderland together, and at one point Clare comes running up to me in mad-tears because "Sol hurt my feelings because she growled in my face. And she won't say sorry." Me: "well, did you tell her you were hurt and why and ask for an apology?" Amswer: no. Of course not, my child is only almost 4. So I say, you have to tell her, and this is what you say. And when Sol comes up, straightway my little girl says, clearly and straightforwardly, "Sol, you hurt my feelings when you growled in my face" and Sol blinks and says immediately, "I'm sorry, Clare," and off they run together back into the plastic wonderland.

My four year old can do it. Take that, you blonde basketcase.

"Barbie in comfy shoes"

But if Rachel Maddow gave me a Barbie doll, I would treasure it. Very cyborg move.

cheap tricks

Having lived the entirety of my decade of married life as a poor grad student bouncing from student housing apartment to another--till landing in this fabulous rectory, The Gwynne House, a year or so ago--I have my own set of "cheap tricks" for making it on a shoestring budget patched together from stipends, student loans, and part-time waitressing gigs. But I'm interested in your cheap tricks. What are your favorite ways of pinching pennies, making a meal out of the random oddities in the cupboard at the end of the week, etc.? I'm looking for everything from recipes for your favorite cheap meals to advice on navigating grocery stores without falling for those endcrap displays...

on the art of rejection

I'm a pretty thick-skinned individual these days, so racking up a nice collection of rejection letters from the very few institutions even offering theology positions this past year has not been devastating. Still, I can't help but notice the amazing qualitative difference in the rejection letters so far received. Compare:

"Thank you for your kind interest in our tenure track position... We received a record number of applications for this position, and so many of them are from such wonderful and thoughtful candidates. I wish we could hire them all. Of course that is impossible. Unfortunately, after review of your credentials by our search committee, it has been determined that we will not be able to pursue this process any further with you. I'm truly sorry to bear this news, but I do thank you sincerely for your interest in our position. I know that the future will bring its own share of success and blessings for you, perhaps even in ways you did not expect."

"...is grateful for your interest in our job... We can now announce that we are offering the position to ----. Again, we thank you for your interest and for the thoughtfulness of your application.  We all think highly of you and your work, and wish you every success as you move forward with your career."

Now, it seems like letter #1 is attempting to say the same thing as letter #2, but in fact, what you get is something more like "we had lots of people apply, some of whom really good but we're not saying whether or not you were one of those, we looked at your credentials and were frankly horrified, sorry to say so, but hey, thanks for applying and just as a parting shot, maybe you should start thinking about a different career path altogether."

[Note to self: JTB, if you ever find yourself writing one of these letters, remember to look up this post in the ol' blog archive before composing it.]

you gotta be kidding

So, yesterday evening at about 5:30, after an hour+ of some extended and touch-and-go non-cooperative toddler negotiations, I come out of the grocery store (having saved $20 of my $78 trip, BTW, thanks to my cuz Renee's tip about coupon.com), with my cart loaded down (with my own tote bags instead of grocery store bags, I love going green, plus, you can stuff a lot more groceries in your own unbreakable bags!), Clare riding on the front like a big kid, and I round the corner to our little green car ready to unload and get home pronto to start dinner. And witness the lady parked next to us in the big new shiny Lexus SUV push her cart directly behind our car and walk off.

I mean, I know that probably half the people that grocery shop don't bother corralling their carts, but most people seem to park them in reasonably out of the way places. Not directly behind neighboring parked cars.

You gotta be kidding me, I said out loud, but she was already starting her car and gettin the hell outta Dodge.

A few years back, I would have fumed silently, thrown a dirty look that didn't land, and been even more furious than warranted because of feeling impotent and helpless. A couple of years back, I would have probably lost it completely and gone overboard in explaining to this woman exactly how awful she is.

Yesterday, I managed (I think) a good, moderate, middle-ground response. Here's how it went down:

Me: [on seeing the cart, to self and Clare] You gotta be kidding me!

[I push my cart past my car, up the aisle to her driver's side window, and tap on it. She rolls it down and gives me a what the hell look.]

Me: Did you just leave your cart directly behind my car?

Her: Which car is yours?

Me, incredulously: The green one right next to you with the shopping cart behind it!

Her: Yeah, I could have done that.

Me, even more incredulously: Why would you do that?

Her: I'm in a big hurry.

Me: Really? Yeah, so am I. And I have a three year old and a cart full of groceries to unload, how am I supposed to deal with this?

Her: I figured the guy would come take it away. And I'm in a hurry.

[I just stare--can't figure out how she could be caught red-handed and not be the least bit repentant. I stare until she rolls her eyes, sighs, and makes like she is going to get out of the car and deal with her cart.]

Me, dripping with sarcasm and really mad now: Oh don't bother. Don't worry, I'll handle it. You're in a hurry. You just go on and have a great day.

[I get no reply. No thanks, no sorry, no nothing. I am so shocked at this that I shake my head and exclaim, "Jesus!" which, I hasten to explain, is not a curse but my shorthand habit of my preferred prayer for patience in absurd and stressful situations, the "Jesus prayer"--"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."]

She ought to be thanking God I'm back on Zoloft. Things could have gone a lot worse for her. As it was, I had to push her cart away from my car in order to unload mine, and her car was so big that she had to execute an extra point in her turn in order to pull out of her space and go past us without hitting her own cart. She refused to even look over the whole time she maneuvered her way out of her spot. So she was minorly inconvenienced by her own mean sneaky laziness, but not enough for me to get any schadenfreude-ish satisfaction out it. So I find myself hoping that deep down inside she felt really bad, even if she couldn't bring herself to show it. I mean, I'd like to think that she's basically a decent person and not a totally depraved wretch.

And my sis thinks I should have just pushed the cart over behind her car instead. There's some really satisfactory poetic justice to that solution. Wish I'd thought of it.

belated tribute to genius

Finally, I am uploading some (sort of fuzzy, sorry, the camera is not behaving well lately) pics of my uber-awesome biz cards from Virgil O. Stamps Letterpress. In case you were wondering, YES, a handful of my cards are backed with a vintage SPAM ad. I'm not giving those away. They are too cool. Others are backed with B&W images of 50's housewives holding big baskets of laundry, or washing dishes, and looking, frankly, a little pissed off. And others with pics of 50's paradise-suburbia. Because Virgil knows, I like irony.

Luddites indeed

seriously?

You might think that, in the scheme of things, the real hurdles of completing a dissertation and defending it would be the research or the writing or the committee or the defense itself. I sort of thought that myself.

Of course, it probably is relevant that I'm generally logistically challenged. But this does beat all.

So, for PTS, once a defense date is set, you are required to submit 2 copies of your defense copy to the PhD Studies Office at least two weeks before your defense date. I think this is so that they can distribute copies to the committee to ensure that everyone has the same version, and keep one on file in case anyone who wants to attend the defense can read it beforehand (which is a nice thought, but...seriously, does anyone do this?).

But since I found out Wednesday night that my defense is set for October 19 (!), I already missed that two week window, which meant that I needed to get my defense copies printed and turned in ASAP.

Which is why I found myself in the campus mailroom at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, after the annual Theology Department reception to meet and greet the entering theology PhD's. With an unexpected problem.

Because those reusable interoffice memo envelopes with the marvelous stringy closures don't accommodate 375 pages of dissertation.

Left with only my willing ness to improvise and the sparse resources in front of me, I jury-rigged a solution by splitting the envelopes down the sides, closing them at the top. This left the sides completely open, of course, but at this point God decided to have pity and provided two and only two rubberbands atop the small container of paperclips beside the envelopes. It wasn't pretty, but the end result was at least minimally serviceable.

And then I discovered that, just like its interoffice envelopes, the mailroom's mail slot for on-campus mail to faculty and staff didn't accommodate 375 pages of dissertation either. This was a problem not so easily rectified. If I'd had a sledgehammer handy, I might have fixed this problem for the mail staff by a generous enlarging of their mail slots, but God's providence ran out on me at this point--no sledgehammers casually lingering in the corners anywhere.

So in the end I left my 375 pages x 2 in a stack on the floor under the faculty mail slot, with a plaintive note that read something like:

Hi!
We are two defense copies of a dissertation needing to make it over to the PhD Studies Office. Unfortunately, our oversized verbosity means that we don't fit through this mailslot, obviously designed for more slender missives. :(
You might also notice that we don't quite fit our envelopes either.
Please help.
Thanks,
JTB's dissertation defense copies

why change the funk?

Was listening to this on the way to school as part of our Halloween playlist. Says Clare: "mama what is this kind of music?" Says I: "it's funk, baby." Then, thinking maybe it might be counterproductive for Clare to internalize, say, the line about "come to me, let me bite your neck" (I mean, I can see a real daycare kerfuffle here), I skipped to the next song. Says Clare: "Mama why you change the funk?"

Top Ten Wish List Now that I'm Actually Finishing this Degree

1. set of new business cards made by the one and only Virgil O. Stamps LetterPress Laboratory (a.k.a., the indomitable Sarah Coffman)
2. that this year's NaNoWriMo will be different...and guilt-free
3. tennis shoes...now that I will hopefully have time to play some tennis!
   
4. a bottle of champagne, thank you very much
5. Here Comes Science!
   
6. that Cyborg Feminist Mom mug TKP designed for me...very reasonably priced, too (or, alternatively, my superhero cape, please? a great addition to the ridiculous academic regalia...)
   
7. speaking of, anyone wanna help with buying some ridiculous academic regalia?
8. Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, edited by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, et al.
9. roadtrip to Canada! (already covered! yay!!!)
10. ....well, I'll leave this one blank (but Brent, you know what goes here).
11. France!
    

UberMouse Meets His Nemesis

Brent and I woke up last night to incredibly loud crashing noises. First thought: break-in by someone unaware that there's not that much to steal? Second thought: crazed wild animal? Possum, maybe? Surely a chipmunk couldn't possibly make that much noise.

Second thought was half-right. Crazed animal, yes. But not wild. Well, only temporarily wild, I guess.

Tiamat caught her first mouse. Unfortunately, after bloodying it and leaving a grisly trail through the dining room and kitchen, she chased it under the radiator in the hall. This was an unsatisfactorily anticlimactic ending for our feline Mighty Hunter, so she swiped at it, and got her paws good and stuck on the glue trap Brent had set out months ago in our failed attempts to defeat the UberMouse.

That's when she started tearing around the place in a frenzy, knocking shit over and making a general ruckus.

4:09 a.m., to be precise.

She trusts me enough that when she saw me, she paused in her flight to let me size up the situation. Then she took off again, to take refuge under our bed.

With the glue trap.

And the mouse stuck on it.

When I tried to coax her out she panicked again, and this time, managed to knock the glue trap in squeezing out between the bedframe and the wall. So that was helpful. It's always good to catch a lucky break now and then.

So I took the glue trap with the mouse on it down to the kitchen, which is when I discovered that our kitchen floor looked like a Tom and Jerry murder scene, by stepping in the evidence with bare feet. Lucky break, over.

Then I looked at the trap, and saw the mouse was still breathing.

Argh. Not that it freaked me out. But now, on top of everything else, I can't help but recast the whole flight of terror from the mouse's point of view. How awful. I mean, you escape the terrifying cat (who, by the way, has no teeth, so what she would do with a mouse when she catches one?) and run right into a glue trap and are mysteriously immobilized. Then, you get pulled out of your hiding place by the monster chasing you, but your end isn't quick and clean. Instead, you get a Romp of Terror up and down stairs and under tables and beds. Finally, some looming shadow comes and puts you out of your misery (details unbeknownst to me, thankfully).

No more glue traps, that's for damn sure.

a thank you

I would have liked to write an ode, but high literary style is beyond my meager skills. Limericks just come more naturally.

There is a librarian named Kate
Who I think is truly great
I was down on my luck
and needed five bucks
and she smiled and said, "five? or eight?"

on difficult conversations with my daughter

This morning on the way back to the house from the garage, after taking Clare to school, I nearly tripped over a dead baby squirrel. I think it must have happened while we were on the way to school, because surely I wouldn't have missed her (him?) if she'd been there on the ground before. Then again, it's morning, and I was still only half done with the first cup of coffee, and not all that observant anyhow. Clare didn't see her either, or, I'm sure, we'd have had another conversation about being dead this morning in the car.

She was missing a foot. I think one of the neighborhood cats must have gotten her.

A few weeks ago in the car on the way to Trader Joe's Clare asked me about being dead. I meant to blog it, because it was really interesting, but it was the SAHM week before school started for her and that meant zero computer time, and so I never blogged about it. And now I can't remember all the details. But I do remember that she asked 'what does dead mean?' and I struggled to find an answer that would make sense on a toddler level (while trying hard to drive responsibly and avoid a more immediate pragmatic demonstration). I settled on "it's when someone's body doesn't work anymore." That seemed to communicate okay. But of course, she was under the impression that this could be fixed and people could be made alive again--and somehow I was responsible for making that happen, or maybe Daddy, who's good at fixing things, or our doctor (very logical). So then I had to explain that being dead is different from being hurt or sick, which can be fixed, and when your body doesn't work anymore and can't be fixed, that's being dead, and that's why when people are dead they don't walk or talk or play and we don't see them anymore. 

Maybe it seems weird to you that I didn't go with "dead means being heaven" or "going to be with God" or use the word "soul." But I didn't.

What I did say, and what she clearly held on to as the take-home point of the exchange (she spontaneously informed Brent of this the next day, in a rather random context) is that God takes care of dead people. Being dead means God takes care of you. I don't know exactly what that means to her. Hell, I don't know exactly what that means, period. But that was the best I could do in this surprisingly sophisticated theological exchange with my three-year-old about what being dead means.

I think explaining sex would have been easier. After all, she's got the vocab down for all that.