Children’s Games, by Pieter Bruegel. This is my number one most favorite work of art of all time. I am intimately acquainted with every inch of it. I have pondered every single child, tried to figure out every single game — some are more obvious than others — wondered what’s inside the building, where are the grownups, why do the kids look like grownups. Grim little grownups.
I landed a proofreading job over the weekend. At first I thought it was a plum. I’m going over the galley proofs of a book that’s going to be published shortly. It’s in almost-final form. All it needs is a pair of fresh eyes to look for typos. What could be more fun than that? (I know, I know. But you’ll just have to believe me that such a job is balm for the soul of this INTJ, detail-oriented, spelling-, grammar- and punctuation-loving gal. Not that my soul needs balm or anything. But.)
Daniel is three today!
And what a perfect excuse to get on my homebirth soapbox.
When Daniel was just a couple of months old we thought he might have an ear infection and I took him to the ER.
Inkling commented:
Things that make you go hmmmm. Coincidi (isn’t that better than coincidences?) are eerie, even when concerning such ordinary things as mugs. It makes one want to cry, ’twas meant to be! But was it? Does the cosmos care if your father gets the right mug, no disrespect to your father? Or possibly we have some kind of power to make coincidences happen for ourselves? But then why the weird ones? Why????
Well, to play devil’s advocate, let’s assume the cosmos doesn’t care. But just think of all the events that occur in a given day that aren’t coincidental. Could it be that the laws of probability dictate that out of all the events that occur, some are bound to be coincidental, and occasionally even weird? Wouldn’t it be weirder if there were no weird coincidences?
This morning in the shower I was thinking about Veronica’s “I am from” poem, specifically the part where she says she is from not reading at the table. I too am from not reading at the table. Not reading at the table was ingrained into me at a very early age, ingrained so deeply that even now when I get the opportunity to eat and read (by myself, of course) I feel like a giggly rebellious teenager.
The other day I read Paul Auster’s The Red Notebook. It’s a wonderful collection of little vignettes or anecdotes that apparently happened in real life, either to Auster or to friends of his. Each vignette describes some weird coincidence, such as two people meeting in Hong Kong and discovering that their sisters live next door to each other in the same Manhattan apartment building. The prose is marvelously economical and clear. The stories are unembellished and the facts speak for themselves.
with its head cut off. This week has been absolutely horrendous. And it’s not over yet. In addition to all the usual end-of-the-schoolyear stuff (if you have a teacher in your family you’ll know what I mean), some web design stuff, some family drama, and some major frustrations in the “inability to schedule a pedicure at the same time as my sister” department, we are getting ready for a wedding this weekend.
