Snapshots, featuring me!

I can't find his camera, which probably means he's been using it even more than I realized. For now though, I'll guest post my own photos to accompany the wordy snapshots. Cause, you know, I take a shot or two sometimes also.

**He was supposed to be getting ready for bed. I opened the bathroom door. No David. Movement to the right caught my eye. Hand soap was slathered over the cupboards, counter and sink edge in a thick orange film, and a giant cloud of soap suds towered from the sink and threatened to slop over onto the floor. Above all this, balancing high on the soap-slick bathroom counter, he stood, swaying and grabbing the flimsy mirrored medicine cabinet door for support. I glared. Lifted him down. He knew. For once, no protest, just "Sorry, Mom. I only started doing it yesterday."**

**He came upstairs as I was watching the sky deepen from the loft window. "What're you do... Oh." He stood and watched with me as the sky glowed in patches of peach and maroon, and doves careened up and down with no apparent purpose other than to ride the fading light. "Take lots of pictures," he told me. I did.**

**He brought my husband his birthday presents. "This one's from just Mom; the rest are from both of us," David said. "Well," my husband replied in his stupid voice, "Mom said she'd be getting me a certain present, and I certainly hope that one is just from her." My son glanced at me. I chose not to elaborate.**

**After Obama's speech, oblivious to the controversies and fears, both imagined and real, with which adults concern themselves, he gave his opinion on Obama's mother ("She had to do stuff on her own sometimes, but she loved him like how you love me, so she did it."), on persistence ("Did you know that lady who wrote Harry Potter had to send it out a bunch of times? Barack Obama said so. I wonder how many tries I'll need to publish my book."), and trying one's best in school ("Yeah; I think he said something about it. Can I have a juice pouch?")**

**I picked up the director's cut of Watchmen for my husband for his birthday. The questions started at once. "Why's that guy making fire? What're those guys doing? Are they good guys or bad guys? Why can't I watch it? When can I watch it? What's on that one guy's face?" Finally, a little fed up, I said "David, don't worry about it. You wouldn't like it anyway. It's not for kids, not even big boys." Of course, he protested. "Really," I said, "you wouldn't like it. It's AN ADULT MOVIE, and it's for Dad and me!" At these last few words, the whole of Borders went quiet.**

**Particularly bright splotches of cumulus clouds in the late-afternoon light drew my attention, and I set up the tripod in the front yard. He followed with his own camera, capturing a few shots of the giant solid clouds and then moving on to some wispy high-flung streaks I hadn't seen. He wanted us to just lay on the car hood and watch the clouds afterward. A passing neighbor chuckled at us. We must have looked odd, I guess. I didn't mind the reaction. David, on the other hand, didn't even notice the reaction. Just said hi and went back to cloud gazing. I think that must mean I'm doing something right.**

**"It's called the K-something, because C was already used up. It's the orange square," David said to his friend while digging in the sand under the slide, referring to a color-coded time line in a dinosaur book they'd been reading. "The dinosaurs all went extinct after the orange square, and it was probably a comet or an asteroid or something hitting the earth, plus lots of volcanoes, and the weather changed." His friend: "But some of them might have slowly died off, and not gotten to the edge of the orange square! So maybe it wasn't just an asteroid." David: "But the rest of them all died then; none of them got to the yellow square." (Yellow square = Tertiary Period.) "AND, there's, like, a layer of space sand on the earth right then!" His friend: "Wanna trade dinosaur books?" They agreed, then they threw sand at each other and dug for the K-T boundary in the neighborhood playground.**

**I got out of my car at the grocery store, and there was a guy standing feet from me. "HAHA!" he laughed for no apparent reason. "Working hard or hardly working?" "Um, probably the later, this time of day, hehe," I said, trying to be polite. He had pushed the automatic thing on his car, so I heard it beeping, but he was walking away from it and toward my son and me. I marched toward the store with much more deliberateness and speed than necessary. He was gone by the time I came back out ten minutes later. Still, I glanced in my back seat before getting in the car. My son thought I was getting his seat ready.**

**He made his own concoction for my husband's birthday snack: half-set chocolate pudding (with much more fudge pudding mix than strictly necessary), cookie crumbs smashed and sprinkled over it, and gummy worms crawling through the soil. My husband actually loved it. Of course he would have said so either way, but I think David could sense the sincerity. He was so proud.**

**I was hoping to spend the afternoon with him, but his friend called and asked if he could come over and play. I was a little sad, but he was so excited. Of course I said yes. He had a great time. Part of me wishes he still only had the best times with me, but this is part of being a parent, I suppose. And he was so happy.**

Remembering

I always feel kind of bad.

If you're a writer, especially one who does any kind of personal writing, maybe you understand. I always feel sort of bad that I don't have anything to say. Well, maybe not anything, but not anything worth reading. I, along with just about everyone in the country who has ever put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, wrote pages of regrettable words in the days following 9/11. It all sucked, every last word of it. Sucked hard. I didn't want to add my own mediocrity to the stream of what was already making people become complacent about a man leaping off a freaking burning building, so those pages never saw the light of day. I think I threw them out last time we moved.

Also, I don't have anything special to add. I can add my own snippets, I suppose: How I got choked up (though I never would have expected it of myself) at a patriotic song the radio played the next day, interspersed with a speech from Bush. How I idiotically asked a store clerk, on September 11, 2002, for the date. I didn't know anyone directly involved in the tragedy, but I know a couple of people who had close friends die that day.

Of course, like everyone, I have my own where-were-you-when story. I was working the overnight shift at a factory that makes small explosive products (which is much less exciting than it sounds). I was a trainer/sometime supervisor, so my "overnight shift" was 6:30 p.m. to 8 or 9 the next morning. Also, I had just discovered I was pregnant and certain issues relating to that had their own attendant stresses. I worked/barfed/worked/worked/worked/barfed/drove home/barfed/tried to sleep/barfed/actually slept/got up/barfed/drove in/started over. That was it, every day. So I didn't get much news during that period in my life. It was because of this, I assume, that the first question my friend asked when he called that morning was "Where in New York does your family live?"

It was my first day off in about two weeks, and after I had a nap (or maybe before; I don't actually remember that part), I was going to meet a friend of mine. I was kind of excited, and it was silly. I had started to tell a few people about my pregnancy (mainly my boss, in case he wondered what the hell was wrong with me; and a guy I picked up before work one evening when he wondered why we had to pull over RIGHT NOW), but I hadn't told anyone from my "old" life* -- the circle of friends I had before I went crazy, basically. I couldn't tell the person I wanted to tell the most (my husband, who was then my ex and not yet my again-boyfriend) because, well, I just couldn't. But I had managed to decide to tell another good friend (who was an ex, had been my husband's best friend, and would briefly become an again-boyfriend -- come on, you have these things too). He was calling to invite me to that lunch. We were going have ribs. (Damn, did I crave ribs.) And I was going to get to tell someone who knew me. I felt good about that.

"New York? Why?" I asked. My brain was already falling asleep, and I didn't really get it.

"Have you seen the news today?"

I turned it on. Of course, no further discussion was necessary. There was the somber-faced announcer. The ten million tickers going in different directions as if statistics and sheer volume of partial information would alleviate the pain. The two planes crashing into the two towers over and over again. A guy leaped from one of them.

I didn't really take it in much, right then. My family is from Upstate (read: not New York City) New York, so that was OK, as far as I knew. I had a few friends in New York, but I didn't think they went near the towers. I didn't really know, actually. And the guy wasn't telling us anything new.

And we went out to eat. I'm still not sure how OK that is. But we'd said and felt all we really could about it, and the immediacy of it had somehow prevented it from sinking in all the way. We still had this one day that we'd managed to eke out a lunch together. We still both had crap in our lives to bitch about. We liked the ribs. Hated the dessert. The televisions in the restaurant had the coverage on. We didn't watch it much.

Three months previously, I'd gotten myself up shit creek without a paddle -- hell, I'd lopped off my hands. That day, I finally told someone whose opinion mattered about it. Exactly six months from that day, my son would be born to much drama, pain, and joy. I hadn't even begun to deal with all the everyday, mundane drama in my own little bubble. How could I possibly wrap my brain around the almost 3,000 lives lost that day and the millions of lives it would directly influence?

See? That's why I never wrote about 9/11. I'm a self-centered little shit.

But I did cope, eventually, with both my own troubles and the nation's. I got emotionally invested. I cried, a little. Wrote a lot. Barfed, though I'm pretty sure that was related to my physical condition. Made jokes at completely inappropriate times.

One of the things Bush said in the speech that was so sentimentally patriotic it would be mocked at any other time -- and one of the things I think everyone unequivocally supported -- was (and I'm paraphrasing here) that we have to move on, remember the little things in our lives too. We can't let this define us. I think that's what I was trying to do, in my own way. I was trying not to let working at a job I kind of hated define me. I was trying not to let being the Rebellious Daughter define me. I was trying not to let unwed pregnancy define me. And I sure wasn't going to let some asshole mass murderers define my one available day of real life in ages.

Eight years later, this morning, my son and I laid in bed together, in that sublime in-between time when you don't quite remember what day or time or anything it is, just that you're together, he's already seven and a half, for goodness sake, his hair smells like coconuts, and you're happy. Then we fought about his homework. Then we made up. As he sucked my cheek in in a overenthusiastic goodbye kiss, I saw a ring of stuffed red, white, and blue paper-bag turkeys along the school's perimeter fence. (Were they trying to be patriotic and get a jump on Thanksgiving? Who knows.) They were interspersed with red, white and blue streamers and balloons. I remembered. David did too. I got a little choked up. Then, he punched my butt and yelled, "Poopdeck!"

Little things and big things.

I know two people with birthdays on this day. I never know how to wish them a happy birthday without sounding like I'm forgetting to remember for a moment -- but still, who forgets about birthdays? I bet some people do. I bet they get less "Happy Birthdays" than just about anyone. It's too bad.

I'm going to hit "Publish Post" now, before I have time to re-evaluate this round of words and navel-gazing, or be embarrassed that I talked about gastrointestinal issues, or even obliquely deprecate myself any further. Because I think that, at the very least, as with so many other things on the exact same day, a little distance has deepened some things, eased others -- helped.

*Except for my mom, of course, who was as awesome and supportive as I expected she would be.

Clouded vision

He looked and looked. At nothing.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

"The rabbit," he said. I rolled my eyes -- unconcerned he might see, because his own were pointed skyward. He always did this. Ask him where his shoes are, or to wipe up the milk, and the mouth goes slack and the eyes roll upward. What the hell is up there?

"Maybe it's behind the bush," I suggested reasonably. A jackrabbit, legs at awkward angles and ears radiating away the afternoon heat, had just loped behind a massive creosote.

"No, Mom," he said. "Up there." (Here "Mom" sounded like "Dumbass" and "Up there" sounded like "Are you high?")

"The rabbit chasing the crocodile," he added as if this clarified the matter. I followed his gaze -- and sure enough, there was a rabbit. To be fair, it had mutated; the ears looked more like antennae and the tail had either elongated or (my son's favored explanation) disappeared behind a particularly long bowel movement. It was indeed chasing a crocodile. The latter appeared to be responding to this encroaching threat by detaching its own tail.

I was late to the game, but we had resumed cloud watching.

It's become a routine. Children, I read recently, become disconsolate each day as the afternoon approaches and passes. The light changes; they re-realize that passage of time occurs and that this day will soon end. They despair.

I don't know about that, but I do know that my son is a freaking jerk if I let him sit on the couch throughout the afternoon. On such days, our conversations go something like this:

Me: Sweetie, why don't you get some homework done? Or demonstrate in some way that you're still among the living?
Him: Mooom! Stop it!
Me: Excuse me?
Him: Stop bossing me a-round!
Me: I don't know why you think you can get away with that attitude, but you can either cut it out or go in the corner and then do your homework anyway.
Him: Mumble mumble whine whine Moooom whine cry mumble sniffle.
Me: Just do your work, and I'll forget it.
Him: No, THANK you! (Flounces to corner, where he sends me Screw you, Mom vibes with his eyeballs.)

He apologizes within sixty seconds and is extra lovey for the rest of the day, but I'd just as soon forgo the experience. We'd sought the solace of the neighborhood park. We were outside for the sheer joy of it, but also to head off any onslaught of grouchiness. It was working.

Today, cumulus clouds dominated. ("Hey, Mom!" he'd said with obvious delight, "The weather was wrong! It's not a clear blue day!" Here, I always try to tell my non-Arizonan friends, cloudy equals good weather.) Cumulus are the big puffy clouds that make such good shapes -- the rabbit and crocodile or, earlier, an ice cream cone on a foot.

He stood in the shade created by my body -- nothing like being used as an awning to make one feel nice and petite -- and pointed out a particularly shapely cumulus mediocris (as wide as it is tall) that looked like a fat skull when viewed one way, or flowers another. He preferred the skull. Then he just stood and stared, his index finger half-pointing but forgotten. The gaze and slackened jaw looked more awed than stupid now. An easygoing breeze chased itself in gentle gusts around the trees as birds skimmed the branch tips, and he stared at clouds as solid-looking as mountains, as tall too, but mutable and morphing like the globs in a lava lamp. A knobby, marbly bit of cloud poked from the rest of the mass and was edged with brilliant while light, reminding me of a kid I'd seen once peeking out of the curtains before a school talent show. David absent-mindedly made a "poof" motion with his hand, like you would do to flick water. His fingers stayed open.

Luke Howard, a Quaker and chemist I've been hearing about from David lately, who made up names for the clouds in a specific year I'll totally look up later, was obsessed with clouds. He began at age ten to keep a weather journal. By fifteen, he recorded the weather conditions twice a day, using a thermometer, weather vane, rain gauge, and barometer. I'm not even sure I remember exactly what a barometer does.

David pointed out a stretch of clouds above the cauliflower mass we'd been studying. It looked like a few streaks of cream cheese frosting spread too thin (everyone knows frosting you can see through is way too thin) over the sharp blue sky.

"Cool," I said. "Stratus clouds too!"

"Actually, Mom, I think they're cirrus clouds. Stratus are the lower-down ones," he answered distractedly, extending a thumbs-up before his face as if to frame a picture, but instead pretending to smear it along the wispy clouds.

I looked it up later. He was right, of course.

David probably knows what a barometer does. He wants to be like the "cloud namer guy," he said. I bet Luke Howard looked in the air for his shoes too.

The science club where Howard introduced his paper in the early 1800s -- entrenching stratus, cirrus, and cumulus in meteorology talk and cotton-ball-bedecked construction paper forever after -- had recently featured a "demonstration" of laughing gas, in which, apparently, they watched each other stumble around the stage for the hell of it. Classy sophisticates they were not. But I bet they knew the day would be cloudy if a pine cone's scales were down. They knew what a barometer did. They knew their cirrus from stratus, even before they had names. I bet they finger painted the cirrus clouds.

Howard's achievement was to use a system to give clouds their own names and character, rather than writing them off as gods in the sky and calling it a day. He chose Latin words, modeling his system after Linnaeus. (Fortunately -- or perhaps unfortunately if you're my husband or son -- he chose carefully, and we aren't obliged to point out well formed, billowy labia or a particularly shapely phallus formation.)

David came home with all this information recently, and has wanted to cloud gaze since then. He's done the requisite blue-paper-with-cotton-balls-glued-to-it activity (Of course I can tell one cloud from another, I lied), and his bonus spelling word the other day was cumulonimbus. He's just scratched the surface, but while I turn at once to a book, he remembers to just look at stuff if he wants to learn about it.

So I followed his example. A week later, I can't believe I ever had a hard time telling stratus from cirrus. I can't believe I went first to a book for the answer, instead of the sky.

Another thing: Arizona, especially right now, is awesome for clouds. Somehow, I never knew that.

Cumulus are my favorite. Clouds that look solid, not even soft really, fascinate me. The raw cauliflower texture; the bits of harsh white light and spots of navy blue shadow, so that it leaves an after image when I take a picture and look away to blink; the climbing and work I need to do to view them properly over the city's detritus as they droop on the horizon; all draw me as no other formation seems to. The dense, chunky, sharply defined forest of white domes heaps together in some irresistible manner ("cumulus" is Latin for "heaped"). This is the reason I never really got Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which is otherwise a lovely meditation. I got stuck at "cloud" and pictured one of these. Never mind the daffodils -- what, I wondered, could be lonely about a robust, lively, conglomerated force like this? I'd love to be a droplet in a cumulus. I'd never, ever be lonely. Cumulus are the "cloud-shaped" clouds, and their basic cloud outline was pretty much the staple (and limit) of my artistic endeavors in school.

But David's right; cirrus are pretty awesome too. They're the high-flung, streaky, smeary tendrils and wisps. Cirrus is Latin for "lock of hair," but they seem even more ephemeral than that, though I know they're made of billions to trillions of ice crystals. They seem to spread, drift, separate and rejoin more readily than other cloud types, but don't quote me on that. They feahter and swirl, unreeling and curling tails back on themselves. The ones David and I saw that day looked like wild flowing tresses, fraying and tangling, unfurling and overlapping one another before morphing once again or dissolving entirely.

Stratus clouds are another beast. They're the ones I notice least. During most of the day, even if they're there, you probably won't notice them either. They're soft, diffuse, featureless sheets. However, if you've ever been in a cloud (fog, that is) it was a stratus. And they really come into their own at sunrise or sunset. Their boringness almost makes it more rewarding, since I'm dumb enough to be surprised nearly every time. I'll check the sky and see a palette of totally blah clouds, and prepare to call it a day. Then, just as the sun hits the houses across the street, the stratus clouds act like a sky-sized softbox, bouncing a brilliant diffuse glow of pink or gold or pumpkin orange through our dining room window. If we go outside -- as we nearly always do -- we're rarely disappointed. The flat clouds stay dark throughout about half of their masses, but the bottom half will be a resplendent, textured gradation from purples and maroons all the way through red and orange, to the bottom, where the light escapes in a lemony yellow burst. Nothing catches light quite like a stratus.

And then there are the cloud moments scattered throughout the last week or so, since I began to notice.

I was driving to the library the other day and saw a turkey vulture flying in the opposite direction, below a massive scaffolding of altocumulus (The big fleecy conglomerations of cloudlets; in this case it looked like perfectly spaced crop rows). The formation, combined with our opposing directions, made the vulture appear to be shooting through the sky even as it lazily tipped and soared.

A collection of overstuffed cumulus merged, turned dark brown-gray and developed into a towering cumulonimbus as David and I watched from the swing set in the backyard. We watched the mass (a cumulonimbus can be up to 60,000 feet high, more than twice as tall as the world's highest mountain) as it flickered. Lightning flashed from somewhere deep inside it and thunder rumbled through its thick billows. My hair stung my eyes as a gust whipped it, doves made tiny black arrows against the sky as they flew for cover, and a lizard sat on the slide, doing push-ups and looking apprehensive. All at once the cloud released its potential, big fat drops raising their own mini-clouds in the dust of the parched ground. Within fifteen minutes the rain cleared (I heard later three inches had dropped in those fifteen minutes in some areas). Everything was drowned in a yellow light. I saw a spaghetti-thin tail disappear as the lizard ran for cover.

At sunset, David leaned precariously from a ladder, craning to capture the entire thing in his viewfinder as he snapped picture after picture. (I don't know where he picked up that habit.) A long thin cloud, pale and shiny like a scar at first, was suddenly lit from behind. Fine lines of deepest red and blazing yellow singed the horizon as, at last, colors bled together and finally drained from the day. David asked me to write that there were stratus and cumulus. I grab a notepad from the patio that on which I'd written a note to myself earlier that week: We are all symbiotic. (What had I meant by that?) I turned it over, took his notes. He found a feather we think is from a hawk and held it up to the light. The sun highlighted and defined each barb. He held it at arm's length and pretended to brush the clouds into the sky. Just before dipping out of sight, the sun cast rays from the lowermost cloud -- crepuscular rays, which the Maori say are ropes restraining the sun to make the day last longer. The otherwise dull stratus clouds held the sun until the last second, casting warm, soft echoes to us. Like breathable light.

I put my notes away, David grabbed the hawk feather, and we headed in. I prayed for rain the next day, but especially for clouds.

Snapshots

More snapshots. His pictures, my words. Well, some of his words too, actually. But there's attribution.

**He stared at the television as an Ambien commercial droned "Risk of suicide may increase," and I wondered what I would say if he asked about suicide. Instead, he said "If I need help sleeping, I try to dream about you. And dolphins."**

**I needed him to be ready to go by 8:30. I asked him at 7:30 to put on his socks and shoes. 7:45, nothing. "David, put your shoes on," I repeated. "Okay," he replied with total sincerity, and continued reading his comic book. 7:55, 8:10, still no progress. "David!" I said, getting heated now. "Socks! Shoes! Now!" "Okaaaay!" he said, disgusted with me for getting heated when this was clearly the first time I'd asked him. I got everything else ready. At 8:30, one sock was on. "DAVID, I WANT YOU TO PUT YOUR SOCK AND SHOES ON RIGHT NOW!" "Mooooom!" he cried, crushed that I was yelling at him for absolutely no reason. We left at 8:37. His shoes were unfastened.**

**He hunched low in the corner of our yard, inching ever closer to our resident black widow. He'd already gotten a shot of the female and male together. He just barely captured a close-up shot of her front legs before she scurried lightning-quick into a crack in the wall. "Spooky," he said, but he was grinning, and he stuck around until she reappeared.**

**He completed a math worksheet in record time, except for the last problem, which asked him to write out how he would use simple subtraction to help him solve the tougher problems. "I wouldn't," he finally wrote. "They're all too easy."**

**When I picked him up from school his face was stained with a tear streak through a thin layer of dirt. I wanted to make it better right away, but no. Something about kids at his table being mean and him trying to help someone; someone else yelling and the substitute teacher being too distracted to notice. We went out to play, even though it was well above a hundred. Much sweat, more dirt, a few piles of sand, a mercilessly unending game of tag and a hummingbird encounter later, I had managed to make it better.**


**While contemplating wildlife viewing he told me, loudly enough for everyone else who was entering school that day to overhear, "I really want to see a beaver in real life. I'd be the luckiest guy in the world, if I could see a beaver up close!"**

**As we walked to the car after school, two vultures leisurely circled above us, their primaries fanned like dainty fingers smoothing the sky. "Those are turkey vultures," he announced to anyone who would listen. One woman stopped and asked him to tell her more, listening carefully, and not condescendingly, as he imparted his knowledge. He strutted the rest of the way to the car.**

Must be nice to be perfect

My son is always right. Just ask him.

Argument From Existence
1. David exists.
2. To exist is to think.
3. To think is to have opinions.
4. Opinions in general are flawed, but David's, obviously, are not.
5. Therefore, David is right.

Argument From Earliness (a.k.a. Argument from Mom Doesn't Want to Deal With It):
1. It's 5 a.m.
2. Therefore, David is right.

Ontological Argument**
1. The unrelenting rightness of David exists in David's understanding.
2. Being totally and always right is a possible state of affairs, and might exist in reality.
3. If something awesome exists in David's mind and might have existed then it would be way better that way. The best state of affairs would be if he was really always right. (This includes bedtime, pizza, and whether the cat licking him counts as a bath.)
4. Suppose (theoretically) that David is perfect only in his understanding and not in reality.
5. I know, ridiculous. But just suppose.
6. If this were true, then it would be possible for him to be even more perfect than he is.
7. This is obviously absurd, as David is already perfect. The definition of David is perpetual correctness. It's a clear contradiction.
8. Therefore, David is right.

Argument from the Unbearable
1. Whining.
2. Therefore, David is right.

Argument from "But You SAID..."
1. David has thought about it, and he really feels an imperative to: jump off the roof/backtalk/wail inconsolably about the evening's addition problems.
2. David's parents said it was good for him to: try new things/speak his mind/share his feelings.
3. David's attention and recall are too important to be bothered by just anything, so it must crucial if he's managed to recall parental guidance to manipulate his parents make conscientious life decisions.
4. Therefore, David is right.

Teleological Argument
1. Constructions such as a complex intergalactic storyline at the age of three, clear and stunning photographs by the age of five, and sketches of animals apparently constructed entirely from phalluses at every age are obviously too brilliant to have been accomplished by anyone but a genius of the highest degree.
2. David invented the adventures of Debka, and produces stunning photographs and whole populations of penisauruses to this day.
3. Therefore, David is a genius of the highest degree.
4. Therefore, David is right.

Argument From Hastening of Public Humiliation
1. David has no qualms about bellowing the names of body parts in public.
2. He has been asked to save it until later or whisper, if it's absolutely necessary.
3. Of course, if it occurs to David to say, it must be absolutely necessary.
4. He favors a stage whisper that is much louder than normal talking.
5. Therefore, David is right.

Transcendental Argument
1. Morality, knowledge, bathing, entertainment, purchasing desserts, pet ownership, and watching television have no meaning except in reference to David's desires.
2. You might think you led a meaningful existence prior to seven years ago, but you are mistaken.
3. Therefore, David is right.

Argument from Strength in Numbers
1. David.
2. Another David.
3. Destructive power of a bucket-wheel excavator combined with voices of howler monkeys and the attention spans of hamsters.
4. Sleepover sans sleep.
5. Therefore, David is right.

I'm so proud. And scared.

**It has occurred to me that the people able to fully appreciate my attempt at humor here are also going to be able to recognize that I totally butchered concepts like the telelogical and the ontological argument. Go easy. It's just for fun, plus I haven't had any philosophy or logic courses in many years. Besides, I'm right. Even David said so.

Today before school

Girl: So we need to bring in two or three, and they have to be decorated by Friday.
Dad: So, next week.
Girl: No, Friday!
Dad: Sweetie, do you know what today is?

Mom: So I'm going to ask you again. Do you want chicken or spaghetti tonight?
Bratty kid: Chicken.
Mom: Chicken, what?
Kid: Chicken, because you're mad at me and won't get pizza.

Teacher: What now, guys?
Kid 1: He was being mean and...
Kid 2: No, HE was being mean...
Kid1: But he called me a butthead...
Kid 2: Only because he called me a freak.
Kid 1: So I told him not to and he called me a crybaby!
Kid 2: But THEN he put up his tall man finger, and pretended he was stretching it but I know he wasn't!
Kid 1: But you did the same thing! You didn't make it look like a mistake. And I wasn't pretending.
Teacher: Guys, that means something very rude.
Kid 2: I know what it means! Like effer-something.
Kid 1: What's that?
Kid 2: Like kissing on the lips, but worse!
Both kids: Ewww!
(They run off to play.)

Mom 1: Oh, I know. Like really, who cares?
Mom 2: Right. I mean, they just take random stuff and put it on their blog.
Me: (Practicing my whistling.)

Of cockchafers and bushtits ... or my husband's sudden interest in nomenclature

How you know your wife is a little off:

(Wife, hunched in chair, thumbs through a stack of reference books and mutters to self): "No, not that. Aw, man. That's all there is. Cock... Cock... Let's see...Oh! Here's cock. Nope. Just 'chafer.' Cockchafer, cockchafer, cockchafer again. Cock-frickin'-chafer."

(Husband, snickering, stares at wife): "Good book?"

(Wife, not seeing anything particularly odd or funny): "What? Why?"

As many of you may know, I geek out for both critters and words. Entomology and etymology, I like to say. (By "like to say" I mean I've actually said it. I am indeed a scintillating conversationalist.) Recently, I've been meshing the two with a growing interest in and some research into the fascinating areas of taxonomy and binomial nomenclature.

Really. "Fascinating" wasn't supposed to be ironic.

My husband remains unconvinced, and is not as taken by the topic. And by "unconvinced" I mean "clearly ignorant of how right I am," and by "not as taken" I mean "bored, and also less interested than he would be in something that might pay the mortgage."

Besides, interest a topic in my husband's universe generally comes in two flavors. The first is in flashiness, explodeyness, behemothosity, dramatic mega-fauna ... if Jerry Bruckheimer, Micheal Bay, or J.J. Abrams wouldn't be interested, neither would he.

The second is innuendo and scatological humor. Happily for family time, he shares this affinity with my son. They could spend hours watching a baboon documentary, not because the primates are so fascinating, but because they have big red butts.

I tire of such diversions after about ten seconds. So naturally, my husband and son can subsist for weeks on absolutely nothing but booby/wiener/fart/balls/poop/sex puns, and the occasional intake of oxygen.

They want to include me, see, but I can be a little highbrow and cerebral. And by "highbrow" I mean "no fun," and by "cerebral" I mean "boring."

All of this to say, the cockchafer conversation was sort of the perfect storm.

Me: Well, I was looking for a certain passage on the cockroach, but all I can find is cockchafer.
Him: Really. Cockchafer.
Me: No, really, see? Apparently it's what we call a June bug. But this guy seems quite taken with the name cockchafer. He uses it an inordinate amount of times, like even if you're going to use that term. Seriously. "The cockchafer has... The cockchafer flies... The cockchafer usually appears... The cockchafer eats..." Hasn't the guy ever heard of pronouns?
Him: Well, maybe he's just a pervert who gets off on that sort of thing. Like that one guy with the clams. Is it the same guy?
Me: Linnaeus? No, I don't think so. And anyway, it's a different, um, anatomical feature than the ones Linnaeus seemed to favor.
Him: Right. He liked clams named after woman parts.
Me: Exactly. I guess the, er, fleshy part of one looked like the fleshy part of the other...
Him: Well, maybe to him.
Me: ...so he named them after things like the vulva, anus, labia, hymen and something about pubes. I'm not sure on the last one. But I think.
Him: Seriously.
Me: And flowers. He really only looked at what they did sexually. Apparently plant sexual reproduction was a new discovery, so a lot of people were pretty taken with it. He named plants by what he thought of their sex lives, pretty much. There's names meaning "promiscuous intercourse," "barren concubines," and "parted legs." And listen to what he wrote: "The flowers' leaves serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity."
Him: Wow. Just, wow.
Me: Yeah. I guess a lot of people were kind of bothered by that, especially in the 1700s, but he really was a genius.
Him: Yeah. I can see that.
Me: No, really! He made the basic system for classifying things. And we still use a lot of his names today. I know he named the Mammillaria genus, you know, the nipple cacti...
Him: Those ones you searched for at work?
Me: Yeah. I got pictures of something, but it wasn't cacti, needless to say.
Him: And why nipples?
Me: I guess he thought tubercles -- those things that stick out, with the spines -- looked like nipples.
Him: Not like any I've seen.
Me: And we still have his mollusk names. Look! Penicillus vaginiferus. Vaginiferous? It sounds like some kind of weird-ass compliment: "Your vagina looks vaginiferous tonight, m'dear."
Him: Ha; how about vaginificent. Or vagipendous.
Me: Oh, wait, never mind. Lamarck named that one. But Linnaeus named the whole genus Penicillus. And, apparently, penicillus is a rarely used term for penis.
Him: So that name means penis vagina?
Me: I guess. Oh, here's one Linneaus named. Penicillus penis.
Him: So ... penis penis?
Me: I guess maybe he wanted to make up for the gender bias in his other mollusk names.
Him: At least he had a heterosexual plant and clam fetish.
Me: Here's a biography. It says Linnaeus "loved nature deeply..."
Him: Yeah. A little too deeply.
Me: ...and that it was his job to make a "natural classification that would reveal God's order in the universe."
Him: So he thought God was overly fond of vaginas, then? So did Linnaeus name boobies?
Me: No, I don't think so. And anyway, that's not fair; that's just the common name. There are a bunch of animals with unfortunate common names. Boobies, titmouse, great tit, goatsucker, dik-dik, slippery dick... Some animals have pretty funny stories about where they got their names, but I don't know those ones.
Him: You're just making these up now.
Me: No, really. You're going to question me on an intersection of etymology and biology? I told you it's fun stuff. At least all we have out here is the horny toad, if people call it that; the wood pewee and dickcissel if you really want to push it; I think maybe goatsuckers; a booby was sighted in Arizona once I think but not in a while...
Him: Sounds familiar.
Me (ignoring): ...and the cockchafer obviously, and the nipple beehive cactus. Oh, and the bushtit.
Him: Hee. Bush. Tit. And I thought there was a whole group of nipple cacti.
Me: Genus. And maybe they made sure the other common names were less, um, distracting. Scientific names are pretty bad too. Enema pan, that's a beetle; there's some kind of snail called Fukuia something; ooh, and a solpugid, I love those, called Eremobates inyoanus. I love that one. A something fartus and a Fartulum something. And my favorite is Colon rectum. That's a beetle too.
Him: Scientists have a warped sense of humor, I guess.
Me: They do! Look; here's a story about a fungus named Phallus drewesii. Apparently, this guy named Drewes was on an expedition with a friend of his who's a mushroom expert, and he found this two-inch-long, crooked, phallic-shaped mushroom and jokingly named it after his friend.
Him: So the whole name comes from a your-penis-is-smaller joke.
Me: Yep.
Him: Well, just find more stories like this, and I might be more interested in this field.

(Later)
Him: Say it again.
Me: Oh, come on.
Him: No, really. Is it "entomology?" I thought that was insects.
Me: Oh! Etymology. Study of word origins. Entomology is insects. Sorry. I thought you wanted me to say the stupid bug name again.
Him: Hey.
Me: What?
Him: Say it.
Me: Say what?
Him: You know.
Me: [Sigh.] Cockchafer.