Poor little Peep; he was so angry tonight. Pestered his sister until reprimanded, then burst into tears and stomped away to his room. I tried to cuddle him in but he was full of spiky, angular resistance. Returning to the kitchen I heard a gust of new sobs; Mojo went in and emerged to inform me that he had, for some reason, yanked back on his foreskin so hard that he had really hurt himself. He spent the rest of the night with an icepack on his junk slowly regaining his sosiego. The new "Clone Wars" TV special coming this Friday helped with that.
It's hard being six-and-a-half, y'know?
We did have a wonderful time a couple of weeks back at the Timbers Kids Club game;
playing soccer and the Peeper got to drill with the players and play munchkin soccer...when he forgets to be serious and spoiled he can really be a terrific kid.Here's a couple more of the pics:
Little girl was her usual happy, chatty, engaging self until bedtime. Informed that it was time to shut down the "Go Diego" computer game she ignored me, confident in her ability to charm the Daddy into abrogating his warning that continued gaming risked losing story time. So she played on, and erupted in the predictable tantrum when informed that she had lost her story time and would, instead, go right to bed.
"I WANT A STORY!!!" shrieked through the little house. From our bedroom where she was jammied, from the living room, where it substituted for the traditional "Nighty-night" with her mother and brother, from her bedroom, where I tried to cuddle her - looking back, gee, it seems like I spent a lot of time trying to clutch recalcitrant children to my breast, doesn't it? - and sing a lullaby...
Finally I laid her down on her Big Girl Bed, still rigid and shrilling.
"It's time for night-night, lovie." I said gently. "I WANT A STORY!!!" came the only reply from the teary little face.
"No, sweetie," I said, brushing her hair off her face, "It's too late for that. And it's time to stop screaming about it or you may lose your story tomorrow night, too."
Huge eyes. The shrieking stopped. In a little voice, Missy restated her demand: "I want a story..." but the hesitance was audible.
"Tomorrow night, dear, and that discussion is over, unless you want to lose even more story times."
Silence.
We kissed goodnight.
That girl is scary smart, and a great tactician. Knows the use of all her weapons, and when to hide the armory and sue for peace.
What the hell am I going to do when she's 17 and I'm 66?
Interesting discussion over at the Milpub about this:Now let me say a couple of things:
1. 2,000 wild monkeys would raise the moral and intellectual tone of several of the infantry battalions I knew at Ft. Bragg, and, yes, I'm looking at you, 2/325 Infantry. Fucking White Falcons; like the Special Olympics except with more brain damage and fewer medals...
2. It says something about my opinion of the Bush Presidency that I actually didn't see this as a mockery of the man; I laughed because of the ridiculous monkey scheme (when he gets to the part where he dubs it "Operation Primate Speargun" I fell over laughing and still do - it's a perfect summary of the serious silliness of military "code names") and the naive idiocy of the guy who often seemed like a poster child for naive idiocy - "Heckuva job, Brownie", "Is our children learning?", that sort of thing. But the man seems like such an insignificant figure now, that the idea of mocking him as a political statement? Never really "got" that. Weird, neh?
3. But my old comrade Publius DID, and it pissed him off. He had some acid remarks about laughing at the criminal bastard, and he posted a link to Andrew Sullivan's piece over at the Atlantic. So I went and read the thing.
4. And so now I'm thinking, yeah, I knew that ol' Andy was a pretty sad little wad of fuck, a homosexual Republican in an era where homo-hating is as Republican as apple pie, still trying to pretend that his cheerleading for the Mess-o-potamia was anything but the pathetic excitement of a leather queen drooling over a Tom of Finland piece of war porn, but this..? This...I can't really describe the mess that is Sullivan's moral and intellectual train wreck. Somehow Dubya, the smirking chimp of a frat boy who spent eight years lying, posing and evading his way around the Oval Office with Dick Cheney's hand up his ass to make his mouth move...somehow this niddering of a nothing of a shell of a "man" is supposed to come clean, supposed to fall on his sword for the torture, supposed to take one for the team?
What fucking world does Sullivan live in?
And I realized that this, this pathetic tottering gelding of an idea, staggering along with its organs of generation ripped away, leaking blood from the orchidectomy and the lobotomy that had caused it to elide the eight years of war loving, crony capitalist pandering stupidity that the Fool on the Hill had presided over, this was the current state of the "moderate Republicans".
Christ. No wonder their Party is such a mess. It's Limbaugh or THIS..?
Thinking of options for the coming weekend; birthday Sunday, anniversary (seventh - copper and wool for you traditionalists, brass for the chic modern types) Tuesday. The "weekend spa/resort getaway is covered...but what about something personal..?
Hard to shop for the woman who is - and has - everything.
Here's an odd little item from the Daily Mirror by way of Alterdestiny:
Seems that in 1909, the African-American residents of what is today Coos Bay decided that they would rather their children be uneducated than sit beside a dirty little Chinky Chinaman. China boy. Little Chinese boy.
Whatever.
Mind you, the condition of a black Oregonian in 1909 must have been pretty wretched. What earthly loathing could have made the presence of poor little Gao Wai so unacceptable? This was a segregated school, mind you - the white people figured that the darkies and the yellas and the other gomers would be just fine as long as the nice white people didn't have to see them.
The human condition - never truly free of horrors like pestilence, war, famine, sickness and death - never seems to be awful enough to make people forget that there's someone that should hate more than other people hate them.
Sometimes I despair for my species.
Anyway, I think I still have a post in me somewhere in Praise of Women. But it's late, and I have an early morning. So; goodnight.
2 comments:
I'm no particular fan of Sullivan's, but I've kind of found his journey from being a hardcore winger to skeptic interesting. If you've followed the guy any, the disillusionment when he learned that his boys were (1) anti-homosexual; and, (2) stupid in their choices of wars was worth the price of admission.
Not so sure that Sullivan really expects Bush to respond or do anything about this. I see this as more of a bill of particulars, a "j'accuse" moment more than anything else. It's accordingly valuable to me.
Publius: I'd call Sully not so much a "skeptic" as a "scorned lover". He doesn't question the bulk of the Bush acts, gives big props for stuff that you and I would scorn, like the "military commisions" of Gitmo or the whole notion of using bullets to kill people into democracy, and generally gives Dubya a big wet kissy...except for that niggling little torture issue. He's shattered that his man-crush turned out to be a skeevy, lying scoundrel. I don't see this as him accusing Bush of anything - he's not telling us anything we didn't know; rather, it's a sad little mash note, begging his now-disgraced former idol to retrieve his Party and his honor from the crapper by manning up and doing the Right Thing. It tells me that Sully is not just a sad fool but a sad DELUDED fool, if he thinks this is anything to Dubya but more bumfodder for the outhouse down at the play ranch in Crawford.
If Sully and the other tiny handful of remaining "moderate" Republicans had somehow been locked in a cave for eight years it would be a valuable, if sad, little text. But you and I and everyone with a working brain were screaming about this stuff six years ago. Where the hell was Sully?
Sad. Just sad. And to think that I was a Rockefeller Republican once, too. Smarter than Sully, tho. I figured out that the monkeys were running the GOP zoo back in the Iran-Contra days.
Post a Comment