6 posts tagged “stories”

I decided to make things a little more foresty, to go with the pointless forest of it all. I was going to draw a picture of the house belonging to a particular pine cone spirit (retired) that I make up stories about. It didn't come off, though, so this is a picture of another house down the way, not nearly as close to the dark and shadowy edge of the forest. I think this is where the pine cone spirit's friend the Umble lives. He has a large floppy hat that is not very clean and (as you can see from the open barn door in the side of his house) often lives with livestock in the house, usually just a sheep or two but occasionally a goat or a shaggy pony. While the pine cone spirit's house is always very tidy and freshly scrubbed, and he is always ready to sit at a nice bare wood table with you to share some tea and cake, the Umble's house is rather dark and cluttered, and the table is generally covered with stacks of paper and recently washed mugs that he couldn't be bothered to put away and maybe some kittens.

When I was five, I liked to put talcum powder on my hands before I went to bed (why, I have no idea). I also liked to get myself a glass of water. The trouble was that if I put the powder on first, I'd get it wet when I filled my water glass. If I put the powder on second, I'd get powder in my water. I did the former, because I was worried that the powder might be poisonous. But one evening, I decided to live a little and do it the other way around.

But after I had been in bed for a few minutes, I was struck with terrible remorse. Oh god! It probably WAS poisonous. How could I have been such a fool? I wept. My father heard my stifled, choking sobs from the next room.

"Are you all right?" he called.

"Yes!" I said. "Fine! I was just coughing."

Then I got to work wondering how long poison could take to kill me. After all, I wasn't dead yet. How long would it be before I knew I was in the clear? I began to calculate. Right now I was in kindergarten. Next year, I would be six and in first grade. When I was seven, I would be in second grade. (Hey! If you subtract five from your age, you get the grade you're in! Clever!) Right. Probably if I was still alive by the time I started second grade, then, I could safely assume that the talcum powder had not, in fact, killed me.

The end.

Snark is working at his computer on the sofa, with his knit hat sitting companionably next to him like a deflated small animal. We have a programmable thermostat that will automatically let the temperature of your house plunge to something cheap and uncomfortable while you're out or sleeping, and heat it back up in time for you to care. The idea, of course, is that you save money without actually suffering any deprivation. However, we set the times back when we both went out of the house to work every day. Since then, things have changed, and he works at home while I'm at my office on campus. You might think that he would adjust the settings to reflect this fact, but instead he likes to try to muscle his way through, and I often come home to find him wearing a hat, a scarf, a coat, or all three. I'm sure he'd wear gloves too if he could type with them. Then I turn up the heat and make fun of him, and he slowly sheds the extra garments. The result is that bits of winter clothing can often be found in unexpected places around the house.

Now he has just idly reached out and picked up the hat with one hand as he stares at the computer. He's put his hand in it like a mitten and is twirling it around and around. Now he's dropped it back down again, and it sadly looks much more deflated this time around: no longer companionable, just defeated. Oops! He's picked it up again and put his hand back inside. He gives it a number of little quick shakes, then puts it back down. All of this seems to be entirely unconscious. His gaze remains fixed on the screen, and his face gives no indication that he has noticed the hat at all. It's just something between Hand and Hat; he takes no part in it himself.

Oh! I'd been spending some time trying to articulate the special variety of ennui and encroaching mortality that has been plaguing me lately (products of this effort not worth keeping for posterity) and while I was engrossed in that, the hat somehow made its way right back onto Snark's head.

Observing all of this has actually been very cheering.

And now Snark has just offered to get up and make us cocoa, and the cat is scrabbling at the door asking to be let out (he'll regret it, it's turned back into winter out there). Melancholy provisionally averted, domesticity ascendant.

Two scenes from class last week:

1. One student has dashed off to try to find water before class starts.

Another student [to me]: Oh, you have a mug.
Me: Yes, my office is just two doors away, so I just brewed up some tea and ambled over. Maybe next time I'll just bring in my electric tea kettle.
Student [clasps hands together in delight]: OH! I *love* tea.

2. In my next class, as it's wrapping up.

Yet a different student: How do you feel about cake on Wednesdays?
Me: Would you bring it?
Student: Oh, yes.
Me: Well, in that case, I feel just fine about cake on Wednesdays.

Never have I known such a prevailingly cozy-minded group.

Hello hello hello! I sent off an article and a bunch of other stuff that was hanging over my head, which makes me flop happily on the ground. Flop flop. So gratifying. Flop.

And don't forget, you are stuuuupid.

There is an awesome episode of Dexter's Lab called "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark!" A six-year-old made up a story about Dexter and recorded it on a tape, and sent the tape off to the producers. They correctly identified it as excellent and animated an episode to go with it. All the sound comes from the kid's tape, and the animation is a charming, kid-style version of the show. They do a great job wittily matching the action to his narration, with a few little gaps in the story bridged very neatly in dialogue-free moments, and fantastic visualizations of the kid's revisions, odd transitions, and trailing off moments. The plot is that Dexter's nemesis Mandark has a sister, or perhaps brother, Computress, who is ticked at Mandark and decides to team up with Dexter to get his/her revenge. They build a shrinking ray to shrink Mandark's head, but Computress accidentally sets it to "grow". As a result, Mandark's head grows and grows and grows until it explodes, causing a ton of little Mandark heads to rain down upon the earth and Dexter to tell Computress that she/he is stupid.

Anyway, one of the clever bits is that Dexter and Computress have a plan to get DeeDee (Dexter's sister) too, sort of incidentally, and the plan is that "instead of having a free spirit, she would have no spirit." I thought that was surprisingly witty, especially for a six year old. Last night I told Snark that instead of a free spirit, I had a nose spirit. When I am displaying my nose spirit, I mostly just poke my nose over whatever he is reading and say "I have a nooooose spirit." It cracks me up every time. Pretty sophisticated over here, that's me!

Iyz-n-the-Hood

I bought new ice cube trays. They are a sort of horrible shade of pink, because that's what they had at the store, and made of silicone, so they're bendy. Also they don't smell weird and freezer-ish like our old trays. But what is really exciting about them is that the ice cubes they produce are really-truly cubes, with eight whole right angle corners. So far, I still find this entirely exotic. Every time Snark brings me an iced drink (which is every night, because I must have my daily bourbon on the rocks, which by tradition Snark makes for me, because I am a 1950s salaryman, I guess) I cry, "My ice is a cube!" My ice is a cube. Is yours?

Our next-door neighbors and landlords (we live in a side-by-side duplex) have a few cats. One, Miller, was originally the husband's mother's cat. He's very old, but still sweet and affectionate, and has a truly remarkable meow that sounds just like someone saying "hello" in a funny voice: "hey-ro". I like him a lot and try to remember to give him some love whenever I see him out on the porch. Apparently he's been ailing for a while, though he doesn't particularly show it. He's not leaky or in pain and does a decent job of keeping himself groomed. But, we're told, he's more or less given up on eating and stays alive sheerly on the basis of some kind of nutritional supplement he's given every three days.

This weekend we got back from a long day of driving around running errands, and Mr. Landlord came to the door as we were putting groceries away.

"I have sort of a strange request," he said. "Can I look under the hood of your car?"

Miller had been missing the night before and all day, and they were afraid he'd crawled off to die -- and the last place they'd seen him made them think that he'd crawled off to do it on our engine block.

"I meant to catch you before you went out, but..." Urrrrgh.

Fortunately, it was not so. Later, we found Miller sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, and he lived to have another nutrient-supplemented few days, at least. Hooray! And I was reminded of the classic example in linguistics (from Ron Langacker, I think) about how canonically count nouns can be used as mass nouns in the right circumstances:

(1) There was a cat in the driveway.

(2) Now there's cat all over the driveway.