Inland Empress

What I think about when I'm not thinking about anything

o I'm lying in bed the other night indulging in my usual far-away fantasy thoughts when Plosh brings up politics. I don't remember what, but it was something particularly gory and nasty and mean. Ruined the mood right there.

I tell him, y'know, I had a pretty good fantasy going until you brought that up.

Naturally, he wanted in. What fantasy?

Sigh.

Well, see, I like to think about having wings. I reviewed a book a while back called The Year of Our War about a guy who was the only one in his world whose wings worked the way G-d intended. Or at least, the way the god in that world intended.

Ever since then, I've been trying to figure out the mechanics of how that would work. I calculate what I'd need in terms of wingspan -- I'm skinny in this fantasy, which helps -- to achieve lift. I also read somewhere that birds spend a lot of time preening to remove bugs and dirt and reposition their long flight feathers.

There are nights when I can't sleep and I lay awake imagining all this useless stuff about flying, until my back develops weird aches from overusing my wing muscles and I feel the need to fluff my feathers.

Unless I also grow tail feathers, I'd have to wear a narrow skirt while flying to catch the wind, which helps both with steering and braking to land. I'd look good flying around in a pencil skirt, maybe a dark maroon to contrast with the earthy browns and beiges of my natural plumage.

I swear I can sometimes feel air currents and eddies under my wings, that I can ride the thermals as the heat rises off the ground at midday, and if I stretch and then contract my flight feathers just so, I can do a belly-roll to impress all you landlubbers.

When I finally drift off to sleep, I have the same dreams as any Mommy; usually about five zillion horrible ways for my children to disappear or die. I wake up panicking until I realize the pounding against my ribs is from two tiny pajama'd feet kicking against me.

And then I wonder what my house would look like from the air.

Proving once and for all that babies do not, in fact, bounce

op quiz time!

The most effective way to drop a baby without killing her is:

a. dangle her Michael-Jackson-style off your balcony;

b. swing her by the ankles and "accidentally" let go;

c. fall asleep standing up while rocking her;

d. launch her from a prone position on the bed while lunging to catch a vintage lamp.

Correct answer: D! Bonus points if it takes your husband's sleep-deprived brain a split second to transition from admiring his quick reflexes to panicky realization he's probably killed her! Ohmigod!

The lamp is perched precariously on a bedside stand. It was late and the baby wasn't sleeping. She did a few push-ups on her Daddy's tummy. He reached for a digital clock that caught her eye.

The two electrical cords are intertwined and the lamp took a dive. So did the hubby. So did the baby.

Milkula is okay. She landed face down on the carpet and took an extremely long second or so to start screaming, indicating she'd not lost consciousness. She has a bruise on her cheek and a reddish spot on her temple, plus a few rug burns on her tummy. Nothing to fret the folks at Child Protective Services.

Five minutes later, she was hugging her Daddy and squealing. All was forgiven. Daddy, on the other hand, still has the look of a condemned man.

Me, I'm biting my tongue. Hard.

A piercing story

y husband is one of these people who's deathly afraid of needles. The dentist had to give him Valium before a Novocaine injection, and even so he got all nervous and queasy. So when I broached the subject of getting Milkula's ears pierced, I worried more about my big baby than my little one.

Naturally, I did what any loving, respectful wife would do, and got it done behind his back. Heh.

It was an operation worthy of the CIA, only I like to think more competently performed.

First, I had to persuade Minitaur he needed another train from the Thomas the Idiot Engine set, or whatever it's called. This took about .00001 seconds, even when I insisted he use his "allowance" money, which consists of him picking his father's pockets every night.

We shook out $40 in quarters from a ceramic bank in the shape of a fire engine. How did my son come to have more cash than his ol' lady?

So off we go to Victoria Gardens, which, despite my protests, is an attractive mall even if cars do run through it, which is just about the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I mean, geez, drivers just do not remember how to share the road any longer. They haven't successfully made room for pedestrians in about 30 years -- I don't even think they teach it in driver's ed any longer -- and then you let them careen through a friggin' mall? And make them parallel park?

Anyway.

We somehow survived the onslaught of impatient parkers and made our way to a Thomas the Torpor-inducing Tank Engine store there. I let Minitaur act out his aggressions on the displays before he proudly offered up several pounds of coinage for Percy, Thomas' gay lover best friend.

But I felt sure Minitaur would need further convincing to come along to a jewelry store with me, so I bought him a Hot Dog on a Stick, just about the best food innovation since, well, anything else on a stick.

Finally, it came time to do the dirty deed, to bring Operation Gold Stud to a successful close and get my agent in from the cold and change her diaper. Or something like that.

We went to a junque jewelry shop called Claire's. Milkula perched in my lap, and then Minitaur wanted to do so too and screamed. He fussed more than she did.

I chose simple 3mm gold studs. First one ear, and a heckuva lot of squawling and wriggling later, with my arms pinning her in place, we did the other ear. Then I held her up to a mirror and she was too entranced by her own pulchritude to cry.

Girls. Geez.

Then I made the mistake of trying to pick out a few more earrings for her. I hear a door jingle and my son is wheeling the stroller out onto the sidewalk. "Time to go, Mommy!"

Um, gotta pay first, sweetie.

"No, it's time to go!"

Men just don't have that shopping instinct, do they?

Somehow I managed to pay, grab the earrings, my red-earred daughter, my red-faced son and the stroller and make it back to the car without getting run over and with only one or two more screaming fits (from my son, naturally).

The baby snoozed all the way home.

My husband made grimacing faces when he came home.

It's been three weeks and the baby looks adorable. Nobody mistakes my baldy for a boy anymore, and my husband has stopped fainting at the sight of her.

And my son's announced he wants another Thomas the Twit Engine.

Name's Boles. Anne Boles. Agent 007-3/4.

Heh.

Some amazing parenting from yours truly

In looking over the Mommy and Daddy blogs nominated over at the BoB awards, I can’t help but notice that beneath the sarcasm and silliness, they’re all such loving, attentive parents.

They clearly need my help.

And because I’m the selfless type, when not being narcissistic enough to blog in the first place, I shall divulge all my parenting advice, which shouldn’t take long at all.

In a word: neglect.

A little neglect is good for a parent’s peace and quiet, and it’s only life-threatening to the child if you forget how to dial “911.” So mark that down somewhere where you’ll remember it.

Then walk away. I like to do something useless, like blog or read cookbooks. I figure it’s okay if my baby is crying. Chances are good she’ll still be crying when I’m done. It’s not like I’m going to miss a Kodak moment.

When Minitaur was about 14 months, I walked away to make a phone call. This is a true story. I don’t make many phone calls (it has something to do with being shy and paranoid) so this was a big deal. It took a lot of courage. And you know what, it was GREAT for me to do it! Because as I was talking on the phone, my son fell off a shelf he was climbing and broke his leg!

Imagine if I hadn’t been making that phone call.

When people asked, “how did your son break his leg,” I would’ve had to say, “I was busy googling the names of the schmucks who tortured me in junior high” instead of the much nobler, “I was on the phone with the pediatrician’s office making an appointment for his vaccinations.”

See the difference? No one can accuse a parent who gets her child inoculated of being a bad Mommy, even if he has to limp into the examining room. Wow, did I luck out or what?

Of course, if you’re going to neglect your kids, it’s only fair to give them something to do. I leave them a few age-inappropriate, dangerous toys. Small parts are okay. In fact, my kids have ingested enough small parts to assemble the Death Star.

Just don’t feed your kids carrots. Carrots kill!

There I was, at Minitaur’s pre-school, asking him to finish lunch so we could go home where I could safely neglect him some more. I got an early start and began gazing into space, imagining myself in some child-free galaxy far, far away when the teacher rushed my son – who had his back to me – and shoved a finger down his throat.

There was a lot of shouting and back-whacking and out of my son’s bright blue face tumbled bits of evil, toddler-murdering carrot!

How was I to know that sensible Mommies pack gummy bears or pudding or other sugary comestibles. What kid ever choked on pudding? As it was, I had a lot of tears to dry up, including Minitaur's.

So, if you are going to neglect your child the right way, learn from my experience. Don’t do it in front of childcare professionals who will hasten to reassure you in a tone that says of course they think you’re an idiot. And never, ever feed your kids carrots. Carrots kill!

You can thank me later.

It's not just a punctuation mark

Okay, enough embarrassing confessions about my soul, etc. It's time I address a subject much nearer to my heart: my colon.

Normally, I don't think much about this part of my body. It does what it does. Shrug. But my husband seems to have realized he's spent seven of the best years of his life cohabitating with a large intestine -- not his own -- that functions, um, shall we say, less than optimally?

He thinks I have irritable bowel syndrome, or Crone's disease, or I'm lactose intolerant or maybe there's some weird, unexplained ailment that occurs in post-pregnant women, or in people who eat too much fiber, or not enough, or just what am I eating these days?

Now, if you ask me, there's nothing wrong. I feel fine. He still sent me a link, which I accidentally trashed, about a new drug that will hasten "intestinal transit time." Or slow it down, I don't remember. Sometimes I have one problem and sometimes the other. Mostly, though, I seem to contribute more than my personal share to LA's notorious air pollution.

This is not my fault. I like cheese and there's ice cream in my veins, so even though both my parents are/were lactose intolerant and several doctors have insisted I am lactose intolerant, I am in no way, shape or form unable to digest lactose. Lactose is good. Especially melted on toast, or smothered in chocolate sauce.

And I do not have an irritable bowel. Opinionated, maybe, but not irritable. Trouble is, that by the time it forcefully expresses its views on my diet, I have long since forgotten what I ate. And I don't keep track of the fiber content in veggie burgers or tofu, and I have no way of plotting "intestinal transit time" like it's a stop on the metro.

I'm not sure why I'm in high dudgeon about this, really. My husband is a fabulous human being, blessed with an exquisite sense of smell. If he'd married the woman he deserved, he'd be swirling a brandy snifter under that handsome, Semitic probiscus or burying it in the softly perfumed nape of her neck.

Instead, he crinkles it, makes a face and retreats to a better-ventilated part of the house. Or neighborhood. I know he deserves better, but I hate soy ice cream. Have you ever tried it? Or soy cheese? I mean, honestly, what's a few undigested enzymes between lovers?

There's a history here, naturally. I once emptied a dance floor at a party, and an entire train car, and you can't imagine how many public bathrooms. Mr. Dallas' seventh-grade math class was onto me, but everyone needed to cheat off my test papers, so they just gagged and passed notes about me and made the best of it.

I try very, very hard every day to keep my emissions to myself, unless I'm at home, where anything goes. Except I'm usually at home, so I've gotten a bit lax in this regard. Not Ex-Lax, mind you, just regular lax.

This has the bad result of teaching my son that farting and pooping are events that must be announced in a loud, proud voice.

Whatever the problem, I seemed to have passed it onto my daughter, who smells like she's decomposing. My husband tells people she's allergic to breast milk. She smiles blissfully. I grimace.

I am not sure why I'm telling the world this. Somewhere out there in the near future, some obsessive weirdo will be googling "Jewish boobs" and "fart" and will stumble onto my blog. I will make this person very happy. Isn't that reason enough?

In the meantime, I should get back to writing about poopy diapers or something more normal like that.

Dinner for eight at seven on the tenth

A good weekend. It gets an A+ in fact.

First, I have another book review in the LA Times. Hooray for me! They lopped a bit off, but the editing was so sensitive -- and sensible -- I can't complain. I love those folks. Honest, I do. They should only read this and know how much I love them and give me many more assignments, because they are such smart, sensible people. Ahem.

And I also did something amazing last night. I can't hardly believe it. You'll be amazed when I tell you. Ready? You sitting down?

I found a babysitter.

Incredible, I know! I found a babysitter and she didn't even charge us any money. We paid her in chocolate chip cookies. No, you can't have her phone number. She's MINE, dammit.

Actually, she's a co-worker of the hubby's and we love her too. We love you, Diane! Babysit for us again, please. Please. Please.

The monsterling had a great time at Diane's house, about halfway between our home and the city. Plosh and I had a singular treat -- kosher Chinese food with a bunch of bloggers.

We dragged the baby along because we didn't think it fair to inflict Milkula, the lacto-vampire, on someone whose mammaries weren't set on Overflow. The restaurant was in a very Jewish neighborhood in LA called Pico-Robertson, near where we lived when we first moved west.

It's a peculiar fact of my life that I was very Not Jewish when I lived in Jewish places, like New York and West Palm Beach and Pico-Robertson. And that I'm a little More Jewish now that I don't. Maybe living among so many ardent Christians these days has made me reach a little further for my own spirituality, or maybe too many brain cells have atrophied from disuse.

Kidding! Please don't send me hate emails. I hate that. 

So there we were, Plosh and myself, frazzled from hauling through horrendous traffic with a screaming baby, to meet this group of bloggers. Jewish bloggers. Orthodox Jewish bloggers. Really funny Orthodox Jewish bloggers.

The occasion was the whirlwind visit from the incandescent, almost rabbinically wise PsychoToddler, who is neither psycho nor a toddler, and who was momentarily escaping the chilly Midwest with his warm, lovely wife, Mrs. Balabusta. What did you expect me to say? That I'm deeply envious that someone who bore six kids is slender and lively and still allows her husband within 10 feet of her?

They're an affectionate couple, all lovey-dovey and huggy, which makes me wonder if they really have six kids together. Then again, maybe that's why they have six kids. Okay, you knew that was coming. Sorry.

We met PT's doppelganger, Dr. Bean, who is much handsomer than Rowan Atkinson, even for the unnerving resemblence. He has a wife too. Everybody does, except me.

Well, technically, Neil no longer has a wife, Sophia, but she showed up anyway.

So there were eight of us, not including the baby, who was quiet and happy and not particularly hungry, which meant I got to keep my top on for most of the meal.

What did we talk about? PT remarked on how great blogging is, that it brings together such different people. I looked around the table and saw eight hardcore dweebs. What's so different?

We talked about our families, our allergies, our Judaism. It was like the food in front of us -- we all shared, but we only got a little taste of everything. A nibble here, a change of topic there. I was still hungry afterward.

But I left with the warm fuzzies. Company is good. Intelligent company is better. Fascinating company over edible, not-too-greasy Chinese food is the best, even if I left feeling I hadn't partaken enough, and didn't know when this particular feast would ever be offered again.

And the baby slept the whole way home.

UPDATE: It's Monday and I just got word that there are three more books on their way home to me, via my special courier/husband. I'm to review one of them for January. Yaaaay!

Six Degrees of Esther

Esther sells potatoes, among other things. So we go to a farmer’s market in Claremont in part because we cannot live without Esther or her produce.

While there, I spy Kurt, whom we haven’t seen in a couple years. Kurt restores Austin Healeys, which he sells for more money than we paid for our house. Kurt has just bought another expensive, authentic Craftsman home, he tells Plosh.

Someone touches my sleeve. It’s his wife, Julia, whose mother is dying. I express shock, and sympathy. We exchange exclamations of joy at the respective sizes of our sons, who were playmates back in the day before Kurt was buying mansions.

I pester Esther for a pen and jot down Julia’s new number. Up walks Stuart and little Sarah, Minitaur’s current love interest. Sarah jumps out and starts smooching my son while Stuart and I chat. Stuart notes that Plosh is doing the shopping and I am doing the schmoozing.

Stuart nabs a young couple, whose names I don’t catch, who are tenants of a mutual acquaintance. We discuss said mutual acquaintance.

By then, Plosh notices Deb buying fingerlings but can’t remember her name. Deb is one of my best gal pals when I have time for actual socializing and is svelte and hip and cool and everything I’d like to be, but blonder.

As Deb and I catch up, a woman interrupts and says “I hear your son’s a future Atidnik!” She’s referring to a private Jewish school we’re considering for Minitaur. I don’t know her. She must’ve learned this from Esther, who used to teach there in her pre-potato days.

We discuss education – mine, hers, the kids – with Atidnik woman, who’s name is Nancy, as I learn after I again borrow Esther’s pen. We’re close to making our escape when I’m spotted by Susanne, Stuart’s wife and another good friend.

Total time spent: 2 hours

Total dollars spent: $40

Total potatoes purchased: Zero

But Esther’s now convinced I know the entire population of Claremont.

A misty trip down memory lane

I'm on vacation, which means that it's raining. The reverse isn't always true, sadly. I'm at Pismo Beach, a fine stretch of sand but the motel lacks a way of reaching it. Just my luck: our "beachfront" inn made no mention on its website that the rickety stairs plunging down a cliffside were an ADA-violating death trap and had been closed for a year.

Fortunately in America, there is no windswept, rugged, gasp-inducing stretch of coastline without its fair shair of blighted motels plopped down like fat, old ladies in bikinis that haven't looked good since Gidget traded in her surfboard for shuffleboard. We're staying in one of these aging doyennes of the dunes, and it's a bright, airy room with a sweeping panorama of the parking lot.

Yes, but, yes, but ... there's a fireplace and two big beds for two small children and their enslaved parents, and we're centrally located to some honky tonk coastal towns that have yet to be ruined by sterile, upscale development. Exploration is on the agenda.

The weather is a weak, filmy shade of gray that shows no signs of lifting. I packed a mix of t-shirts and long-sleeved things, which means I have already run out of warm clothes with six days to go. This is good. Usually I don't bring anything warm and spend my vacations huddling by air vents and car engines, hoping the second law of thermodynamics will see enough heat transferred to thaw the slush in my veins.

I once sunbathed topless in Greece in November, a feat that should've seen me immortalized in stone. But the Greeks aren't doing statues these days and in any case I couldn't convince them I was Aphrodite and not just another horny tourist. I was at a resort town called Matala, which I'll never forget, because when else in my life will I find a hotel room for $3 a night with actual running water, both cold and very cold.

I was 22 and just out of college and was on yet another stretch of my Grand Tour, having frittered away a rainy summer (of course) in London, only to have the clouds chase me all the way through Italy and eventually down to the Red Sea in Israel. Matala consists of a smattering of downscale kiosks and gyro stands in Crete. It held some promise of late autumn sunshine, at least during the day, and nights saw us English-speaking teens and twenty-somethings shivering in bars getting drunk on cheap ouzo (a nickel a shot) and finding thrilling ways to keep warm.

By day, we loaded up plastic shopping bags with bottled water, jars of nutella and fresh bread and hiked to a remote stretch of beach away from the immediate line of sight of the hostels and cafes. In other words, the nude beach, or almost nude, if you were relatively prudish like me.

Somewhere in obscure parts of Canada and the Bible Belt, there are once-handsome men, now probably balding and pot-bellied, who have a secret trove of vacation photos they never let their wives destroy. In them I am posing in all my well-endowed, monokini-clad glory. I wish I could have just one of those photos of me in my prime, all golden delicious and fat-free, a mere 120 lbs., basking on a beach oblivious to the long years of zaftig, self-pitying spinsterhood ahead of me before I'd meet Plosh.

If nothing else, I'd show my college-aged nieces I was actually cool once, if a bit reckless and crazy. I can also impart some hard-learned wisdom:

Sex is expensive.

It's expensive when you have to pay for doctor's office visits to rid yourself of certain microbial souvenirs of the trip whose vectors of transmission cannot be described on a family blog. It's expensive psychologically when you have to think up interesting lies to throw your parents off your scent so you can avoid the told-you-so lectures and head-shaking.

From a self-esteem point of view, though, my escapades were spectacularly cheap.

Sex is still expensive, of course. We're here partly to escape the medical bills from Mugwort's birth -- $3,000 out of pocket so far and counting. And partly we're here so we can dump our beloved little brats on their grandma and indulge in a few minutes of frantic groping in our $99-a-night room. The one with the asphalt view.

The nice thing about sex at my stage in life, besides the fact that I get any at all, is that it's with someone whose name I can usually remember. Plus just in case we stop getting along, we both know where the other keeps their old boxes of photos.

Family of the book

Oh dear, only 29 hits today. At this rate, Inland Empress will catch up to Book Buds, my other blog, with a mere 19 hits. *sigh*

As you can probably guess, I'm waaaay too overwhelmed to blog much lately. And what little "spare" time I have is going to Book Buds.

I feel obligated now that some 8 or 9 publishers have started sending me books. Most stumbled onto me by themselves; I think I only solicited books from 2 or 3. I think publicists account for 2/3 of my readers, the others are googlers.

My payment, as it were, is free books. Lots of them. So many that I just sent more than 100 off to Houston to the littlest Katrina victims, thanks to the nice folks at Pitzer College who coordinated the effort.

The bookshelf is refilling itself fast, however, since September's the month when publishers rush titles out the warehouse door so they're on store shelves by October when the Christmas shopping season unofficially begins. 

This week, I received two boxes from Random House and FSG, 11 books in all. The invoices said the books were worth $165 collectively. Yikes. Who can afford that? From the short time I worked in textbook publishing, I do indeed know how expensive it is to typeset illustrations, graphics, unusual and hand-lettered fonts and other whacky stuff.

I understand how the price can go up and up, as you factor in the special, high-quality paper and all that ink, plus a higher royalty for big-name authors and illustrators. Kids' books are a higher-end product than your typical paperback romance or even a hard-cover bestseller, and publishers sell fewer of them, so they have to recoup costs somehow.

But yowzer, $16.95 for a mere 32 pages?

I'm left pondering this odd fact of our existence: how to make Monsterling and Mugwort appreciate the vast library we own. Monsterling's brand-new bookcase is already filled to capacity, with books piled on the floor. Yet his enthusiasm never wanes for each sighting of the UPS or Fed-Ex truck.

Too late, I realized I should've had him help me bundle the books headed for the Astrodome, so he'd gain some small idea of what charity means. He's accustomed to us complaining we haven't the money for a larger house, but he has no concept that he stumbles over the equivalent of a down payment every day.

Funny that we worry we can't find the map to buried treasure, and it's sitting in heaps right in front of us.

Eh?

Mugwort talks! Seriously. She's a regular conversationalist, with a huge, highly nuanced vocabulary. Okay, the entire vocabulary consists of "eh" but you wouldn't believe how much she can emote in that one little syllable.

Take, for example, the following conversation we had just the other day:

Me: Are you napping?

Mug: Eh.

Me: I didn't think so. You hungry?

Mug: Eh.

Me: So do you think the Gaza disengagement will really lead to peace with the Palestinians?

Mug: Eh.

See what I mean? A regular Daniel Webster, that little orator of mine.

Sometimes her ehs sound like grunts or squeaks or snorts. We began calling her our baby mastodon for her seismic squawking.

And while most babies wait until around 6 weeks to start differentiating their cries, the hubby and I can already distinguish several variations to her mastodon roars.

She talks to my boobs with a pleading eh eh eh as if to say, "How am I gonna fit all THAT in my mouth?"

When her Daddy holds her close, she gazes up into his face, alert and fascinated, emitting a sweet, quiet "eh" that says, "I have gas."

Fail to heed her hungry cries, marked by a more assertive EH, and it becomes an all-out, bawling EH EH EH EH. That one needs no translation, I think.

I have high hopes for my little girl. I'm thinking lawyer? Negotiator? Maybe a politician or speech writer. Maybe an actress. Why, just one "eh" from her ought to win over the Oscar judges big time, maybe for Best Performance by a Really, Really Small Mastodon in a Spitting Up Role ...