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Archives from 2002-2006

Last Thursday I saw the Pixies on their Doolittle tour and it was absolutely amazing.

I don’t know what I enjoyed more, the fact that judging by the thinning hairlines and mom-purses in the audience I was surely not the only person who had last seen them in concert twenty years ago, or the group singalong to “Hey” which featured a hundreds-strong voice singing as one:

WHORES in my head
WHORES in my door
WHORES in my bed

JB took Riley to Coos Bay for the weekend while he was down there elk hunting, and I thought it was going to be really hard being on my own with Dylan. And you know what, it was fantastic. I don’t know if it was the one on one attention, or if he’s just finally (and probably temporarily) free of the viruses that have been plaguing our house this fall, but we had a great time together. I’m grateful for a happy weekend of really appreciating what an amazing little guy he is.

Oh! And on Friday I saw a coyote in front of my house. That was cool.

When I was a child, I tested into the gifted programs at my schools despite the fact that I never did my homework and thus consistently earned a bevy of terrible grades and at least one teacher’s public prediction that she was surely doomed to see me the following year as my chances of graduating from elementary school were so low. Apparently at some early point there was potential for my brain to be filled with useful information, but as I would continue to establish throughout my scholastic years, I am the sort who prefers to use a protractor for scratching my name into a wooden desk instead of measuring decibels or geography or, like, whatever it is protractors are actually intended for.

I squandered my young thinking-meat on Black Beauty books and making my Barbies rub confusedly against each other, then eventually on mopey English goth bands and a plethora of Saturday school detentions during which I once gave myself an abominable prison-esque tattoo on my hand using a needle and india ink which years later I eventually paid hundreds of dollars to have removed with painful lasers.

During college I majored in getting drunk, ill-advised personal relationships, and nicotine-coated Golden Tee arcade games. Among many other classes, I flunked Introductory Japanese, Graphic Design, Algebra, Life Drawing, and Accounting 101 with a resounding flush of my mother’s tuition payments.

Which is all to say, I have some personal accountability when it comes to my current intellect. The fact that I am shamefully stupid about any number of subjects—to the point where I cannot stand to watch Jeopardy! for fear of picturing myself somehow transported to the show and simply standing there with a line of drool escaping from my lower lip—has an awful lot to do with the choices I’ve made throughout my life. Maybe if I’d paid attention every now and then I’d be able to name the capital of North Dakota, identify Shakespeare quotes, or calculate a tip without producing a thin, acrid plume of smoke from both ears, but alas.

I will say, though, that I have long suspected that parenthood has slashed my already-meager I.Q. to a level on par with the box turtle. When the majority of your day involves strategizing how to most efficiently remove feces from the underside of someone’s testicles . . . well, there’s just not a lot of room left for loftier pursuits. I guess some parents chase toddlers all day and still read Infinite Jest all night, but those people are robots who probably never tattooed their own hand.

Plus, the lack of sleep! How can anyone retain anything but the most basic of motor skills when we’re operating on an ever-worsening sleep deficit? Sure, I can’t complete a Sudoku puzzle to save my life, but whose fault is that? Surely if I had a good night’s sleep—just one— I’d have a fighting chance at the intellectual pleasures I was once predicted to claim as my own, right?

Sadly, it is with a heavy heart that I tell you two things: 1) that during the last 48 hours I have slept over eight consecutive glorious hours at a stretch each night, and 2) while I was driving to work this morning, feeling mentally rejuvenated and ready to take on the world, it STILL took me 15 minutes to figure out the fucking license plate on this SMART CAR:

There is no hope, is there? And you know what’s even worse, is the knowledge that soon enough my kids will be bringing home homework—that I won’t be able to understand.

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