Oct
10
Riley has moved into a real, no-shit preschool class at his daycare and now instead of a little scribbled form saying he ate peaches at lunch and crapped at 3 PM, he gets this longish note listing off the various class projects he took part in. Lately, according to his note, he has been learning about calendars, talking about What Is My Favorite Pet?, writing numbers, and assembling paper bag puppets. This all sounds well and good, and whenever one of us picks him up, he’s always nose-deep in some activity (a great improvement over the 2-year-old classroom free-for-all that seemed to happen starting at 4:30 PM — probably couldn’t be helped given their age and the time of day, but I always felt like there was something a little feral about fifteen kids running around brandishing toys and yelling, like they could turn Lord of the Flies at any moment and start donning war paint, hunting pigs, and bashing each other with boulders), but ask him what he did during his schoolday and all he’ll say is, “Um . . . played with toys.” Press him for details and the answers are more than a little unreliable:
“Did you play with Legos?”
“Yeah!”
“Did you play with dynamite?”
“Yeah!”
“Did you play with the ancient ruins of an Indian graveyard, resulting in a horrific spiritual uprising complete with deadly clowns and swimming-pool skeletons, just like in Poltergeist?”
“YEAH!”
It’s funny, he routinely blows my mind by proving his memory can be downright eerily accurate (one crazy example: recently he asked if we “‘membered that Christmas tree at Uncle Joe’s house” — well, yes, there WAS a Christmas tree at Uncle Joe’s . . . TWO YEARS AGO), but either he’s got a secretive ‘what happens in preschool stays in preschool’ approach to how he spends his time three days a week, or those nice smiling teachers are actually pelting the children with leather whips all day long and he’s repressing all the painful memories.
Or, you know, he’s three, and basically as inscrutable as Britney Spears in her shaved-head, umbrella-wielding days. Most of the time I suspect his skull is stuffed with equal parts Profound Fathomless Knowledge and Limitless Potential — and a giant half-chewed wad of those orange candy circus peanuts.
Oct
8
I saw this article today in The Morning News, and it reminded me of a post I wrote in 2006 detailing my experience attending an embalming (my brother-in-law is a funeral director). It’s one of my all-time favorite entries, and if you’d like to read it, it’s archived here. Be forewarned, it’s graphic, and may be unpleasant for some of you.
If you’d rather NOT read about such things, may I disturb you with something else? BEHOLD:
I think there’s such a thing as a fashion don’t, and then there’s THIS.
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