Acabo de ver "Despicable Me" anoche por primera vez. He went from wanting to exploit children for profit to being a protective dad unrealistically quickly, but OK. It definitely tugged at the ol’ heartstrings. It was tough watching him flush his dreams. He could have been one of the most famous men in history; instead he’s just another stupid consumer trying to raise kids that don’t talk in a movie theatre. The best you can hope for, then, is that they’ll realize all the dreams you failed… all the fucking dreams you gave up to raise a kid.

Why couldn't I make Boss Lady and her daughter a priority? Why did Latin and Wikipedia seem so important? Are they really? Is being happy? I don’t think so, but making them is.

Joke/a peek inside the Spanglish-speaking toddler's brain

________________________________
> From: Speedbump
> Subject: Joke/a peek inside the Spanglish-speaking toddler's brain
> Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2013 14:43:05 -0700
>
> Me: "One, two."
> Baby: "One, me!"
>

Not exactly a nightmare

Had a dream I went to the job they told me not to come back to Monday; I just somehow automatically got ready + headed there before getting there, having someone recognize me, and having to quickly fabricate an excuse about just dropping by to get the soda I left in the refrigerator. Also I’d shown up on Saturday, not Monday.

Also realized I dreamed about Speedbump. And The Baby.

Who is underdoubtedly a lot bigger and verbal than that by now.

Dream where I was visiting Speedbump at her (new) house somewhere, thought The Poet was gonna come home, but he didn't... I feel like the guy who ended up showing up was somebody to check the EMFs or something from a tower, like, right centred in their house... I think that's about when I left + it was night + I think we were somewhere in the States + maybe I was looking for a Ninja Turtles shirt for Lefty... which is when I think when I ran across Emu and Blondie... They, I think, were working on some article, when I saw the byline later, I was sad... In the dream, he took her last name and also part of her last name changed; that's just how they did it out there... And I wasn't, like, heartbroken, just that general melancholy feeling I get when I find out someone's gotten married... Which lately seems like everyone. Also in my dream was buying a Ninja Turtles shirt for Lefty in... where were we? Seattle? Somewhere else... And whoever'd bought it on my behalf had worn it and I was like, "Eh..." I walked into a restaurant and he was there, on his way to a show, or, no, a baseball game...

When I was watching Bart throw pebbles at Milhouse' window last night, I thought of Therria and I was sad.

I'm missing all this

________________________________
> From: Speedbump
> Subject: Sorry, I'm too impatient to find the right keys all the time
> on my mom-s computer
> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 22:35:50 -0800
>
>
> > > Siempre ha dicho "casco" en español. Pero "kicking" en inglés.
> >
> > Studies have shown that bilingual children usually go for the easier
> word initially.
>
> Mostly that's been the case for The Baby - pan instead of bread, dog
> instead of perro - but there are a few things where he goes for one or
> the other because he likes the word more. I get the impression he finds
> it more fun to say, or funnier. Or sometimes because he hears it for
> the first time (or notices it more specifically) at a moment when he's
> having lots and lots of fun. So, like, he says "calcet'in" and
> "zapato", even though "sock" and "shoe" are much easier and he can
> actually say them, because he thinks, or thought, before he was saying
> them all the time, that they were funny. (And "calcet'in" is pretty
> funny to say!) And he now says "papilla", whereas before he never even
> tried saying cereal or mush or porridge at all, because the other 
> babies were visiting and he was all gleeful and bouncy and
> wanting to repeat everything everyone said no matter what. Sometimes he
> says both. Half the time,, instead of one or the other, he-ll say
> "come!Ven!Come! Ven!"
>
> He also switched from saying mam'a to saying mommy a month or two back,
> but that was very obviously because he suddenly heard everyone
> referring to me as mommy, whereas in Europe, nobody but me did.
>
> The overriding thing I've noticed with him so far is that if he can-t
> say a word all the way right, he'll take some consonant from the word
> that most grabs his attention, which is definitely not always the first
> letter of the word, and say all the vowels right, but put that one
> consonant in for every consonant sound. So Santa Claus is Kakakaus.
> And, actually, zapato is papapo and calcet'in tatet'in.
>
> Then he gets these really cute solutions sometimes for when he can-t
> say a word. Like he-s been able to say "big" for a long time, but can't
> say "small" or "little", so for when he doesn't want to use a sign,
> he's started saying "baby", for "little".
>
> Perhaps one of the funniest mispronunciation of his is that for
> whatever reason he can't say "white", he says "whitey", with a really
> strong T.
>
> And just yesterday he started being able to make the F sound a little.
> Before he just made a really exaggerated S!
>
> And he still gets really, really happy whenever he hears words he knows
> in songs. It-s like he-s surprised and happy to know that the man or
> woman singing knows that word, too. :) 

Three updates in one

This was supposed to be three separate ones but who has the time?

Woke from another Therria dream.

The highlight of my weekend was making Ariadnæ come from fucking.

Woke to new e-mail from Speedbump: She’s pregnant again.

I watched “Princess Bride” tonight

I really don’t think anything else needs to be said.

The problem is, she’d put up with too much of my shit.
But I can’t tell her that, because she needs to put up with his shit.

So, in addition to going to see a doc about atheism in which someone reads from “the book of the Easter Bunny” (likely a nod to the recent “Simpsons” rerun in which Homer says to Ned, “and did not the Easter Bunny himself say...!”) from a big wood board, in Braille, and then this girl who was kinda cute, but I wasn’t really that attracted to, was talking to me about it, we were hugging and smiling, ’cause I told her flat out, “You’re wrong,” on this one thing, maybe from arguing at that Afghan bread girl at the farmers’ market, and I was raving about Sam Harris’ segment in the film which I’d seen, or seen something similar to parts of on YouTube, and then I was walking down lower Shattuck, like before the fire station and on the way to Berkeley Bowl with Frank B., and the Sikh from the farmers’ market, in fact, come to think of it, had opened up a storefront down there, and there was a sign that said “[Something] and Farmers Market,” and I remember thinking, “someone should tell that Punjabi dude this doesn’t really count as what English-speakers would think of as a farmers’ market.

But, Speedbump was in my dream. In a picture. And The Baby. And The Baby looked so old, like as old as he did in that picture I glanced at—shit, he’s about to turn two!—and I remember saying, “Fuck it, I give up, on getting him anything or even trying to be a part of his life,” but then, somehow, I obviously couldn’t mean it, huh? ’cause in the next scene I’m in some store I’ve been in before, asking the saleslady about developmentally appropriate toys for two-year-olds, and then I was in a bike shop, watching the proprietor’s kid ride a trike around like right before they were about to close. I was going to try and get a new, metal tricycle, instead of a used plastic one. They’re not cheap (at least in the dream).

It’s not that I don’t want anybody else… It’s just that I don’t love anybody else more. And there’s a difference

How I feel/felt about her seems distant, almost like a dream… and maybe that’s how it has to be.

It's really funny 'cause I was wanting to write a post trying to articulate how I felt last summer - even at the time, I realize, it didn't feel... It felt like "now," but it didn't feel like... on the plane of my usual experiences. Like it was still me, but living someone else's life, moment to moment felt like a different state of consciousness somehow. Dammit, I think I had a better way of explaining this before. You know, like sometimes you can look back at when you were younger, and realize that the feeling of experiencing life moment to moment somehow felt different when you were, say, 10, or 3, or 17? Or like how different cities feel, aside from the smell, or weather, or time of day; you're in this different place, and the corresponding consciousness sort of feels different. I guess that was it. It wasn't just the drive up and that different place. EVEN BACK HERE FELT LIKE THERE. I guess maybe that's it. This sort of trasladable consciousness.

And I just realized - I don't know if/why I never made this association before - of course I've been capable of projecting it on her, for some of the blither, perkier, more naïve or idealistic happy pronouncements she's made... but why would I think myself so immune, and cool, and irrational? Just 'cause I'm fucking miserable. Of course my state of consciousness was different. My brain was pumping out a different set of chemicals.

That was some pretty good shit, though.