Look out!

I may post again one day, but meanwhile this fall is shaping up to be the rampiest ramp ever. When I went to high school all I had to do was show up. R. has to go to Open Houses, and fill out applications, and take tests, and...decide things!

And speaking of The Ramp, how am I ever going to deal with college admissions?

The 39 Steps

I'm two days late on my birthday rubric, but here goes:

25 Years Ago
I was fourteen. I hate to say this, but I think I messed up last year in my eagerness to tell my Tina Turner tale. I think that was my fourteenth birthday. For my thirteenth birthday, I had a slumber party, about which I remember four things:

Inspired by Martha Plimpton in her Calvin Klein ad, I had just had all of my ill-advised perm cut off in an edgy short haircut.

I wanted to get one of those packages of individual cereal boxes for breakfast, but my mother felt that the other mothers would judge her for serving cereal and made pancakes instead.

I was wearing black and white dolphin shorts and a white sleeveless top with lots of complicated flaps and lacing.

The next day there was a picnic for the town's 60th anniversary, which helped me place this memory more accurately.

Half My Life Ago
I was nineteen and a half. I had just had one of the worst days of my life--on which I did not get into the eating club of my choice--followed by one of the best, on which I was "sung into" my beloved a capella group. I did eventually become a member of that club, although the question in retrospect is, was it the club of my choice? In January of 1990 I started dating a boy, a much sought-after and very nice boy. My relationship with him caused me to expend a lot of energy every day pretending to be someone I was not. I did this for his benefit, but he was not usually around to see it. Yes, my boyfriend was very busy, so busy that I had dinner with R. almost every night during this period. And luckily, R. was also in Eating Club of Choice and that's The Rest of the Story.

That semester I took a course in British Women's Fiction. When it came time to write a paper I met with Professor Deborah Nord and told her I wanted to write about Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner. She suggested that I compare it to Doris Lessing's Martha Quest*, and I told her that I hated Martha Quest. In the paper, I explained why Martha Quest was a totally unbelievable and unsympathetic character because of her ability to believe mutually exclusive things about herself and her life simultaneously (whereas Lyndall in SOAAF believes in nothing). A few weeks later my boyfriend broke up with me and I realized Martha, c'est moi.**

*Incidentally, why do teachers and professors do this? My junior year high school English teacher made me change my term paper topic and then commented on the final draft that I didn't seem very excited about my subject.

**After the breakup, my mother commented, "I'm so relieved. I thought you were going to marry him, take a menial job to support him through medical school, and then end up divorced."

RIP John Hughes

Like Michael Jackson, he entertained my generation, and his work will live in our memories. Unlike Michael Jackson, he doesn't seem to need to be defended. And unlike Michael Jackson, he won't garner days and weeks of breathless news coverage.

I chose this clip not only because I think it is the greatest movie kiss of all time, but also because the extras on my Some Kind of Wonderful DVD include an interview of John Hughes (by Kevin Bacon!) in which he says that the character of Keith was essentially a self-portrait.

Hospital Sketches--with apologies to Louisa May Alcott

One of the many joys of parenting hospitalized children is the "chair" that turns into a "bed." In the dark days before the Simpsons, Matt Groening published collections of his Life In Hell comics. "School Is Hell" included a comic entitled "Fun Science Facts" such as "Ringworm is not ringed, nor is it a worm. It is a fungus. A puff adder is not a puff, nor can it add. It is a snake...A fish stick is not fish, nor is it a stick. It is a fungus." The chair bed is not a chair, nor is it a bed. It is a fungus.

Accordingly, I was delighted to observe that T.'s hospital room featured not only a crib and two fungi, but also a real bed--and that we had the room to ourselves. I asked the nurse if I could sleep in the bed and she treated the idea as something incredibly transgressive, but ultimately probably okay. My back thanks me, but my thighs were repeatedly bitten by something in the night. Bitten by an insect that lives in a hospital. I'm trying not to freak out about the possibility of African sleeping sickness, Hanta virus, or MRSA.

It was one of our better hospital stays--but the best day at the hospital is still worse than the worst day at the beach.

T. managed to--in short order--completely remove not one but two intricately wrapped and taped gauze caps designed to prevent him from ripping off the electrodes on his head. We are very proud. Luckily when the tech asked "is he active?" I answered "very active" and thus she attached his electrodes with glue.

Residents on rounds do, in fact, answer questions with the false bravado followed by squirming qualification that one sees on Grey's Anatomy.

I know more about infantile spasms than neurology residents do.

T. is well and has started taking medication. Thanks to all the kind commenters--and to those who had kind thoughts but did not comment--and welcome to new readers.

In There

I'm afraid I'm going to end up hating Infinite Jest.

Not because of its length--I'm tripping along slightly ahead of schedule, although I always feel vaguely that I should either be farther ahead or staying with the pack--or its lengthy sentences.

Not because the math--especially the math+politics+game recipe of the Eschaton scene--makes me betray the sisterhood, go all Barbie and squeal "Ew! Boy stuff!"

Not even because I can't bear to see Hal shut down, although that comes close.

It's because of what's going on in my life this summer, which I will forever associate with Infinite Jest. I cannot go to the Olive Garden because when my first college boyfriend broke up with me, we had plans with another couple at the OG that night, and he felt that we should still go and pretend to be still together. I cannot drink vodka or banana-orange juice because...well, I suspect you know why. I hate the smell of hospital receiving blankets because they bring back the stress of T.'s hospitalization.

This summer I found out that my beautiful baby boy T. is blind. It's hard to get this across to health professionals sensitive to the continuum of "visually impaired," etc. but I think one expressive term would be "pretty darn blind." As in, please stop waving that thing around, he really really cannot see it.

And later this summer, this week, I found out that T. is having seizures. Seizures that are highly correlated not only with mental retardation, but also severe behavioral problems in the years to come. The neurologist tells me that quick diagnosis--for which, I think, in his cold doctory way he is trying to give me some credit--and prompt treatment makes for a better prognosis.

I keep thinking about Hal and his "I am in here." I know, with certainty, that T. is in there. Whatever happens, I intend to devote myself to assuring him that we, who love him, know he is in there.

When I go to the hospital today and see my little sweetheart hooked up to the forty-some wires of the EEG, I will be grateful to have a big book to read. I love Hal, and Pemulis, and Mario, and Joelle, and Gately, and I actually kind of like the endnotes, and Eschaton seems like something R. would love even though I can't get into it myself, and I kind of identify with Avril...but I won't want to read this book again.

RIP Michael Jackson: Joining The Cavalcade

Today the blogosphere will be choked with posts in memory of Michael Jackson. Since I started blogging I've eulogized Wendy Wasserstein, Madeleine L'Engle, Dan Fogelberg, William F. Buckley, and Paul Scofield. They--especially the first two--were perhaps more personally significant to me, but I think this death stands out as the first one to really rattle my whole generation.

The subtext or the supertext of every shared video, every status update, seems to be this: let's not be so cynical. It occurs to me, rather guiltily, that we have been cynical about Michael Jackson for a very long time, long before the abuse allegations and the increasingly bizarre behavior. I seem to recall a strange glee, a laughing behind hands, after his hair caught on fire in 1984--not unrelated to the glee John Dickerson observed around Mark Sanford's downfall.

Michael Jackson was an incredibly talented singer and dancer. I have been watching and listening for hours now and his performances as a child fronting the Jackson 5--in days when technology made vocal talent much harder to fake--are nothing less than phenomenal. His dancing--as evidenced in the moonwalking clip above, or in the "Black Or White" video--was also phenomenal. He may have been a triple threat, because for all we know, he was acting for every moment of his public life.

My father watched my twin entry into adolescence and pop culture with interest, so he was right there with me when Thriller burst on the scene, a sign and a wonder. I remember his comparing Jackson to Fred Astaire. We taped the "Billie Jean," "Beat It," and "Thriller" videos onto our new VCR so we could watch them over and over again. I also remember my father talking about Jackson with a kind of tenderness. Jackson's vulnerability was apparent even when he was on top of the world, and my father compared him to other over-the-top performers--Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, Cher. We should cherish them, he explained, because their ultimate motivation is to entertain--to give. Sometimes they give too much.

My school shoes for freshman year of high school were black penny loafers, and my best pair of socks were silver lamé. I practiced moonwalking for hours. "Thriller" showed us what a video could be. "Beat It" made Al Yankovic's "Eat It" possible. I watched the premiere of the "Black Or White" video at my eating club in a jam-packed TV room. We had the luxury of sneering at it a little; we thought we were past Michael Jackson. Now I watch it and think, the dancing! The rap! The beat! "Man In The Mirror" makes me cry every time I listen to it, key change, gospel choir, and every other heart-tugging trick, because it's true: that's where we all have to start.

So I'm starting with the woman in the mirror and asking her to be a little more childlike in her appreciation of the great entertainers in life. To focus on the moonwalk instead of the feet of clay.

And with respect to the elephant in the room, I'll just say this: Michael Jackson was found not guilty in a court of law.

I'm Still Still Still Here

When I was in college, I had to take two semesters of science, and I consciously shopped among the guts. Except professors don't like it when their courses get a gut reputation, so while "Physics For Poets" was pretty much as advertised,* "Rocks For Jocks" had been tweaked to be less walk in the park, more trudge through the desert. Maybe it would have helped if I had been a jock. Anyway, one of the questions on the final exam was "What is the single most significant way in which man has altered the earth's history?" I chose agriculture and wrote a chewy little essay about it. When I went to pick up my blue book with its rather sad grade written on the front, I leafed through the other exams waiting in the box (I wonder if that activity still exists?) and noticed that a) the professors were just kidding about the "single most" part, and the other students all somehow knew this** and b) some people had written their answers in bullet point form, and gotten better grades than I.***

As it turns out, that has very little to do with this post. The conceit of this post is that I have traveled into the future and retrieved a "What I Did Last Summer" essay, but because my future self is even lazier and less organized than my present self, it is in bullet point form.

• Read Infinite Jest
• Got the baby on a real schedule which included an afternoon nap at the beach
• Finished my book, after surveying the two vast-wastelandish shelves of teen fiction at Barnes and Noble and vowing, once again, that I could do better
• Cooked delicious local fresh food, despite the disappointing provisions from the CSA
• Wrote a review of Walter Kirn's Lost In The Meritocracy
• Blogged weekly
• Gave up on the poetry podcast. Mostly.

*Well, it was easy, but not designed to appeal to the poetic temperament, if I may be presumed to have that. It's funny, just lately I've been noticing the ways that math applies to daily life--and I don't mean like making change, I mean like the wildly varying rate of banana consumption in our house, which as Johnny Falschgedank**** pointed out, must have a limit. Would I like calculus if I took it now?

**Johnny Falschgedank tells me that if I had gone to see the professor in office hours, or gone to any extra study sessions provided, I would have known that too. Things you learn when you go back to school in adulthood.

***I fear my Zeligesque style is already being affected by David Foster Wallace.

****Johnny, whatever happened to your blog?