Kira Disapproves

Every once in every teensy-weensy little while, I am NO FUN. Kind of mean. At my worst moments, extremely passive aggressive. I know it’s hard to take in. Amanda has a nice little anecdote about that in her blog today. Keep in mind that it all turns out well. And, Tracy, I’m sorry I spent part of my Paris time at EuroDisney.

One thing that can do that to me is traveling. Time zones, for example, are a problem. I can’t get them right. I was so surprised when my two hour connecting flight to Arizona took five hours, and once I get into a new one, I immediately forget that others ones exist. Also, I get nervous when I’m not sure I’ll make a flight/catch a bus/find the person I’m going to see

But this trip, minus the “surprise” five-hour flight, has been just lovely. I made it to Pam’s. An is now safely here. Eden and Caren are just a few hours away and will be here Friday. I saw Rose today, and Carlton and Mary are out there somewhere in the nearby world, too.

I’ve already worked out about ten writing problems since I got here, edited a story, and started a long overdue outline

I just needed a post for the next time I start complaining about stuff. Today, I’m pretty darn content.

Tomorrow Spring Break reallllllllyyy begins!!!

I haven’t updated this in a while, and I just got a bit of writing done. I’m working on another project for a fellowship appliation that is going much less well (there’s my good English!), so I’ve been neglecting this project. Maybe I’ll get a few more words in on writing date tomorrow, but I still have Providence Hill revisions to finish. We’ll see….

Still, almost half-way is better than nothing! (Although not better than the full first draft I wanted to have before Spring Break.)

woodcock,
originally uploaded by ricmcarthur.

It’s not exactly a secret to most of you that I don’t see myself living in Georgia the rest of my life. I want to live in New York, Seattle, Rome…somewhere a lot busier and a whole heck of a lot less Southern.

However, Georgia and I have had a bit of a breakthrough this week.

On Friday, I went to dinner with some friends. I had a fairly large helping of Margaritas, so I probably shared all my secrets and all of yours. After that, we all went to a bar in Cabbagetown, a very city-ish part of the city, albeit one full of unsold trendy, new houses. NPR came on the radio during the car ride playing the depression song from Annie (We’d like to thank you, Herbert Hoover! For really showing us the way….)

Anyways, there was a roadblock on our way there, but we got around it and went to the bar, Lenny’s. They were holding a fundraiser for a local bike co-op, and there was, among other things, a big parade of awesome papier mache skeleton costumes and BIKE JOUSTING on extra-tall bikes.

Finally, on the way home, we ended up back at the roadblock and Elizabeth realized that the big lights beyond the detour signs meant they were filming a movie.

I got way more excited than was cool, and Sandra rolled down her window and asked what they were filming. The guy standing there guarding the set said “a Nickelodeon movie.” Everyone else seemed unimpressed. I considered climbing out of the two-door car via a window (reference earlier Margarita info.) If they had said “Disney movie”, I would have. It later occurred to me that they might have said that to scare us off from something cooler.

Little did they know me.

Today, I went to a park outside the perimeter with Pat and Joel on my very first bird-watching expedition. We were searching for the little guy in the picture, a woodcook. He’s pretty hide-y and nondescript, but apparently he does this neat spirally mating dance. As we drove into the parking lot where the little fella had been spotted, we saw another bird watcher standing there with his binoculars.

Turns out it was avid birdwatcher and former Lt. Gov. of Georgia Pierre Howard. He was a really nice guy and he helped us look for the bird, which we caught glimpses of, but not the mating spirally thing. I am more of a moon and star-watcher than a bird watcher, so I spent a lot of my time watching Orion sparkle into being above the trees as dusk fell (and perhaps a minute here or there training my binoculars on the big mega-mansions that have popped up across the street from the state park.) But hearing the bird calls and breathing in the clear, spring air coming off the river as it got darker and darker was pretty darn cool.

Maybe you can do that stuff anywhere, but this weekend it all just had a distinctly Georgian feel. I’m re-reading Gone With the Wind right now, so maybe I was lured into thinking about the “red earth of Tara” or some such thing. But it’s the first time this place felt friendly and solid for me in a while.

(Of course, come Tuesday, I’m out of here!)

Bored at Work,
originally uploaded by Schlüsselbein2007.

I am trying not to watch TV right now. I’ve just gotten insanely addicted to crap like HGTV and TLC and I need a break. I was hoping once I adjusted I would be writing and reading more. The problem is, writing and reading are great, but not relaxing. I need some mindless stuff to do.

Baking sometimes helps, but if you get too mindless while baking things go badly.

Taking Lila to the dog park is a nice distraction…for about ten minutes.

Any ideas out there?

(Of course this will not be a problem come Tuesday when I’m on Spring Break with Pam and An!!)

(The picture was the best “bored” illustration on Flickr under a CC license. I may try this. So there’s one activity!)

Upside down. She flipped her head over while I was taking this.,
originally uploaded by kmariwalsh.

I bought this t-shirt from The Strand in New York a few years ago. It was made by American Apparel and it’s teeny-tiny, so I never really wore it. I ended up using it as a comfort item for Lila when she had to be left in her crate. Once she outgrew the crate, I tied it in knots and trained her that it was okay to use it as a toy (as opposed to my other t-shirts. We had a learning curve on that one.)

Well, it is now her FAVORITE toy. It cost $10.00. She’s been using it for more than a month and a half now. Nylabones, by contrast, cost about $4.99 and she chews them into nothing but a pointy, useless stick in about ten minutes. If I have kids, I’m going to take the risk and just get them the cardboard box for Christmas instead of a toy. (After I tell them the truth about Santa, of course.)

The best (worst?) part is, whenever Nikki sees Lila with it she asks “is that your Mama?” because her baby nephew has a t-shirt of his Mom’s he carries around and calls “Mama.” Oi.

I wasn’t going to post this because everyone who reads this site pretty much knows about it. However, there are a few people who haven’t and I want to be all suppourt-y (plus I know my Atlanta friends just love hearing about my awesome, smart, cool, fun Seattle friends.) So…  Caren, Eden, and Shane are the proud parents of a new online lit mag of super-short fiction called “Brain Harvest.” Their first story went live yesterday, and they’ve already had upwards of 50,000 hits.

The best part is, they’ve also had hecklers, per the comments section on BoingBoing. Hey, guys! You’re making people angry! That means you’re doing something absolutely right.

Bagels!,
originally uploaded by kmariwalsh.

Pat taught me to make bagels _ages_ ago. (Okay, two weekends ago. Why is it I hate parentheses so much except in this blog?) I kept putting off posting the pics because I wanted to figure out how to blog more than one flickr picture at once.

Well, it just isn’t going to happen this month. Or anytime soon. So here is the best picture. Those are the awesome completed bagels and the awesome Pat, pretending to be on a cooking show.

Because it really was exactly like a cooking show! We made a new batch of dough, and boiled and baked a completed batch (you boil bagels to get them bagel-y. There’s those parentheses again. Don’t go thinking you can use them in fiction and I won’t try to talk you out of it.) So right as we finished the first steps, the finished product was ready out of the oven.

Oh, the magic of television.

This post falls in to the “why would anyone care what I think?” category more than most. But can I just say that everything going on with the Octuplet family really upsets me? Maybe this woman is not capable of caring for eight babies, but I wonder if there is anyone out there, including the hospital, who hasn’t been affected by the wholly negative media spin on the situation. If her kids are taken away because she can’t care for them, that’s one thing, but if she receives different treatment from child services because of the extraordinary nature of their birth, that might be harder to defend.

I really just get upset at anything that appears to be portrayed in a completely one-sided way. Since very early on, I haven’t heard anything about the family that isn’t negative. Even the gradmother seems to believe her daughter is an inept mother. Her opinion has been presented as salient in most cases, while the daughters discussion of what sounds like extreme loneliness, if not outright depression, in childhood had been trivilaized in most accounts.

This case also has eerie similarities to the Dionne Quints, whose story I became fairly obsessed with for a few months after reading their biographies in middle school. I couldn’t get over how unfair and eerie and uncanny it was. The Dionnes were the world’s only identical quints (two are still living) , born in Canada in 1934. The government villified their parents after they accepted an offer from a travelling show to display the children in exchange for money and help with their care (Jon and Kate Plus Eight, anyone?)

The government ended up taking custody of the girls and raising them until they were in their teens and their parents regained custody. Oh yeah, and while the government had custody, they went ahead and put the girls on display twice a day in the courtyard of their hospital. They called it “Quintland.” At times during the Great Depression, there were more visitors to Quintland than Disneyland. Seriously, they even put them in movies, where they called them the Wyatts instead of the Dionnes to avoid emphasizing their French ancestry. See a clip here.

In the end, the quints had nothing good to say about almost anyone involved in raising them (including the government and their family, and excluding the doctor who cared for them during their time in the government hospital.) In various accounts of the story, different villians emerge. No one ever seems to ask the question of whether there was any “best” case at all. Who knew how to raise five identical kids? Who knows if things would have been better if they had been left with their parents? It’s impossible to tell now, even in hindsight. The only lesson from what the quints personally consider to have been a tragedy is that as much care should be taken with a similair situation as possible, and striving to keep as many people who care about kids in their lives as possible and keeping them as far away from the media as possible seems to be a good start.

Once again, I acknowledge that I have no real expertise in this. But I’ve been thinking a lot about writing one of my course papers on the how shifting conceptions of childhood in popular culture affect biological and medical approaches to childcare. This seems like a particularly apt and potentially sad case, and the lack of discussion over the Dionne connection has struck me as interesting. The quints are actively interested in keeping their sad example in the forefront in the case of multiple births like theirs. See their open letter to the McCaughey family upon the birth of their septuplets in  1997.

Clearly this case is complicated in different ways than the Dionnes or the McCaugheys. There appear to be questions about the ethics of fertility practices and it does seem that some media-seeking behavior by Ms. Suleman has been questionable. Still, I wonder if we’ll know the true story until these eight kids are writing tell-all books or filing lawsuits years from now. I guess I need to learn more about the case.

Any thoughts? Help me with my paper.