There is room in this world for a lot of simultaneous truths

My roller coaster is down again.

I don't know - if you're not depressive I'm really not sure I can explain it to you. Because you know how last month I was talking about how I was finally happy for a change and I felt a real sense of possibility in the world? Nothing has changed since then. Nothing. And yet I was crying on my way to the gym today, for no reason at all.

Well, okay, not for no reason, either. There are problems in my life, and I feel them pretty deeply some days. But I know better than to take action when I feel like this. I've recalibrated my life so that everything has a waiting period. I don't make decisions hastily. I rarely talk about things I'm upset about when I'm upset about them. What is so real, so imminent to me today isn't false, exactly. It's the truth I'm living in right now. But years (more than a decade) of this roller coaster have taught me that if I wait, it will be balanced out by other truths, the ones about how I am lucky, and healthy, and busy, and loved. Sometimes, when it's a brief depression, I can see those truths waiting on the other side. Sometimes, if it drags on a long time, I lose sight of them.

Tonight I know what is happening; I've been slouching my way toward this one for a few days, and according to my calendar I will start to bleed tomorrow, and shortly thereafter the welschmertz will lift at least somewhat and things will balance again, to whatever extent. These are the better times, when I can see that and look at my calendar and say, okay. I will not make any decisions or discuss anything important until at least three days from now. By then I will have the perspective that currently eludes me. But I just...I am pretty deeply unhappy right now, in the moment that I write this, and that's true, too.

I went to the gym (because that helps) and read about genocide in Rwanda while I did cardio (because it interests me), and then I got out and started to drive home and my partner called to say that my oldest friend's mother was in the hospital in critical condition after a motorcycle accident. And I called my friend's husband, and I talked to him, and then I just hung up and cried again. Her mother is the only family my friend has left in this world.

I felt as though hearing that should force perspective on me, should make my own insignificant miseries recede into their relative smallness. But it doesn't work like that. Comparative suffering doesn't really make anyone feel better; it just makes the misery of the world stand out more sharply, and makes us feel guilty for the way we hurt over whatever unhappiness is ours.

This is what my flip side looks like. I don't put it out there much; dwelling on it encourages it, I find, and I am a fan of good old-fashioned repression to an extent, at least when it comes to myself. But this is part of the life I lead, and it's no less true than my politics or my love for my kid or my stories about my family or anything else. It's just less interesting, regardless of what Tolstoy would have you think. And it too shall pass.

Squidbits

Sixteen months.

Reading material the Squid has lifted off shelves (at our house or at the bookstore) and offered to me this month:

• A Desert Survival Manual
  
• Romeo and Juliet (He cried when I put it back on the shelf.)
  
• 100 Love Poems (This is a Neruda anthology. He dunked it in the dog water bowl.)
  
• The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
  
• Nerve: A Magazine About Sex
  
• Trelawney of the Wells and Other Plays

I'm not sure if these are for his edification or mine, but I rather suspect he's getting a bit ahead of himself in his reading tastes. Either that or he's trying to tell me something...though I can't imagine what it might be.



He plays peek-a-boo properly now, hands over eyes and a timed reveal. The joys of the chase have also manifested, and he loves to run away and be found, or to chase after me and find me. His current favorite form of self-entertainment (and yes, he self-entertains, and for long periods at a time, too) involves toddling laps areound the living room, waving various toys (spatula, pajama pants, blocks, remote control). Around and around and around, with occasional pit stops to come sit on my lap or hand me something, then off again.

He mimics faces - if we blink at him, he'll blink back, and he has a particularly awesome scrunchy face we can get him to make sometimes too. He loves to go outside, and, um, carry the rake around. Go figure. The great outdoors is the ultimate baby draw; he wants to go outside as soon as he wakes up, and he wants to stay out there until dinnertime. We have finally found easy-to-slip-on shoes for him, so we mostly just let him go to town. With the rake. Himself makes music videos of him doing this stuff, but has asked me to stop posting them, more's the pity; we had some particularly excellent rake-carrying and dancing movies this month.



The dancing is still going strong, with more refinement (some upper body movement, etc.) and expanded musical taste - it used to be just bhangra music and the Blues Brothers, but I have caught him rocking out, in the past few weeks, to the Ramones, the Beastie Boys, Kristin Hersh, The Academy Is..., and Edith Piaf, among other things. Awesome. Baby has rhythm - he sure as hell didn't get it from me, so all hail the contributor of the other half of his genetic makeup.

Of course, his musical taste is a bit like his reading taste, in terms of the CDs he offers me. Our CD shelf is seven feet tall and alphabetized, so right now he's mostly digging artists S-Z. Sterolab, Tom Waits, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Cassandra Wilson, Voice of the Beehive, and XTC were all recent CD choices, proffered up with a toothy grin. I'm sure, however, that as he gets taller older his tastes will mature into the M-R range, and eventually comprise the whole of the alphabet.



June 16: So fucking gross - I picked him up out of his crib this morning - he was cheerful and sunny, but covered in crusted puke. His bed, his blanky, his sleeper - they all had to be changed, and he had to be showered to get the dried chunks out of his hair. None of the adults in this house will ever eat mango again, I think. Gah. My life (have I mentioned?) is very glamorous. Aaaaand...I typed that while he was sitting on my lap, and picked him up to go do something, and we had baby's first projectile vomit, all over me and the kitchen! Oh, milestones are so exciting. I think I win partner of the month award for not calling Himself, who had just escaped to the gym, and making him come back and help clean up. Happy Father's Day, honey.

...and I ended up getting that stomach bug, which lasted for a week and made me fragile all the way through my friend A's visit and my thirty-third birthday party. Stupid stomach bug. I never got sick before I had a kid! Never!

He has a charming new habit of groping me absentmidedly while I carry him around. If I wear a lightly padded bra it's mostly harmless, if socially inappropriate, fondling. But if I'm carrying him in the morning, before I put my bra on, woe is me. I yelped, "Ow! Fuck!" the other day at a particularly vicious nipple twist and Himself looked startled and then spent a very unhelpful couple of minutes doubled over wheezing with laughter while I tried to get him to hold the little reprobate for me. Very funny.


If you mess with him, he will hurt you.

I felt sure I had more to say than this, but perhaps not. All measurements perfectly normal as of last pediatrician visit - my child is perfectly average, just like me - and developmental benchmarks right on track, except the doctor wants us to encourage him to talk more. He'll get around to it, is my feeling; it's not like we don't talk to him, read to him, ask him questions - he just doesn't feel like it yet. Eh. Perhaps I am taking this low-anxiety parenting thing too far, but I don't think so.

Concert review and opera drool

I went to a concert last night for the first time in six years or so. Link goes to my extended review, in case anyone is interested.

I kind of like going to things like that (concerts, operas, movies, plays) alone, actually. I can sit in the wayback without frustrating my companions, and enjoy it all on my own terms. I used to do it a lot more often, but then there was my partner, and now there is the Squid, and I just don't much anymore. I have other priorities, for the most part.

But if Damon Albarn's Monkey: Journey to the West comes anywhere near me - and I'm talking "anywhere on the West Coast" near - I will pretty much have to drop everything and go see it. Because hell yes.