How now! a rat?

Seven fascinating facts about rats. (Inspired by my personal crusade against the rat colony in my alley.)


1. The so-called Norway rat--which is actually from Mongolia (and is the species found in Chicago, my foes)--arrived in North America on ships from Europe in the 18th century.

2. Rats box -- they rear up and push each other with their forepaws. It is not known whether they gamble on the bouts.

3. In 19th century England, rat baiting was popular: the rats were placed in a pit with a dog and wagers were placed on which dog would kill the most rats.

4. What about the ROUS’s? Fossil remains of a rodent that lived in South America 4 million years suggest a creature more than 8 feet long and weighing 2,000 pounds.

5. In the 1970s, Chicago’s Bureau of Rodent Control killed rats by pumping cyanide gas into their burrows and beating them to death with broomsticks when they came out for fresh air.

6. Rats occasionally surface in city toilets. Seriously, this is not an urban legend. There are youtube videos.

7. You can register your “fancy rat.”

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a bootless inquisition

"God, babies are annoying."
(what I thought when I held my three-month-old niece for the first time and she spit up on me)

"God, babies are irrational."
(what I thought when I held my three-month-old niece and she kept crying for no apparent reason)

"Had you forgotten?"
(what my husband said to me when I expressed the above)

"Yes."
(my response)

"Only child psychological effects"
(what I googled)

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Limbo

Question: What does hell's waiting room for unbaptized souls have to with doing backbends under a broomhandle?

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a most triumphant lady

Scroll all the way down and ask yourself why Chicago is so underrated, even by Chicagoans. I've left this city without sentiment many times, and have tried to leave many more, forgetting how much I would miss it once I'm gone.


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Dogeared

From Bill Buford's Heat:

"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"
Filippo glanced casually in Dario's direction. "What in the dick are you talking about?" (Che cazzo dici?) he asked lightly, continuing the line of genitalia metaphors that so robustly characterize male Tuscan exchnges.
"You fat head of a penis," Dario said loudly. "Why is this on your menu?"

You don't tell a romantic that it can all be explained by economics--especially when the romantic is your host. What's more, the romantic might be right: maybe it wasn't all economics. Maybe economics itself was a metaphor, a pseudo-scientific way of acounting for something much more mysterious, this profound, dark thing Giovanni referred to as the Tuscan soul.

(What is dogeared?)

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Get thee to a nunnery

Joseph O’Neill’s review [caution: the last paragraph contains a spoiler for The Driver’s Seat], in the September Atlantic Monthly, of a new biography of novelist Muriel Spark has this interesting discussion about female writers and their children:

Spark provided for her son financially and would drop by in Edinburgh from time
to time, but she never even tried to combine a mother’s usual responsibilities
with those of a writer. She remained on red alert against that enemy of promise,
a son’s need for a full measure of love. The pram in the hall could squash
someone else.

Of course, rarely is anyone much detained by the parental flaws of
male writers—of Spark’s contemporary Saul Bellow, say. But the case of Spark
chimes interestingly with that of Doris Lessing. Lessing was born in 1919,
married at the age of 19, languished in Southern Rhodesia, abandoned (two)
offspring in search of freedom, and ended up in postwar London trying to care
for a third child while making a living and a professional name for herself. (If
Virginia Woolf had trouble finding a room of her own, imagine being broke and
un-Bloomsbury.) In one of her memoirs, Lessing suggests: “Writers, and
particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to
work.” This sounds like an understatement, particularly in relation to the last
pre-feminist generation, to which she belonged. Dipping into it, we see that
Penelope Fitzgerald, a mother of three, did not publish until the age of 58,
that Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor and Patricia Highsmith were childless.
Spark may not have been alone in associating motherhood with artistic and
personal annihilation.

I had this idea that giving birth might unleash my artistic fertility. I don’t think it had any basis in reason or experience. I guess it was more like wishful thinking. Certainly it has not happened. The difficulty of balancing motherhood and artistic endeavor is weighing on me particularly heavily right now. I want to have a second child, for various reasons, but I recognize that those plans are incompatible with my desire to carve out space in my life for writing.

On the other hand, I still cling to the idea that if I could just find the time, some part of the obstacles that dam my creativity have been washed away by motherhood. This, again, does not seem to be based in reason or experience, and may be wishful thinking. It’s just a powerful analogy in my mind. The fusing of body and spirit inherent in giving birth, the physical act of building another human being within myself and pushing him out into the world—surely the ripples of that impact have expanded out and washed over my soul, leaving it renewed and energized and ready, finally, to fulfill the ache to create?

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Dogeared

From Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders:

"His whole life was confined by these things."

"I put my face to their necks and breathed the yeasty scent of them. God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so."

"It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade."

(What is dogeared?)

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A gift that heaven gives

Every year, dozens of spiders hang out on outside my office window, 44 floors up. It's amazing. It always makes me think of Charlotte's babies flying away, calling "Goodbye, goodbye!" to Wilbur as he yelled for them to come back.

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thither would I hie

Top 3 things I want to say in my "all personnel - all offices" farewell email if and when I leave my firm:

1. I am moving to a yurt in Montana, where I will be embarking on a new career as a deputy sheriff.
2. I am leaving to work on my forthcoming expose, Law Firm Confidential.
3. Please contact me if you need local counsel in Kauai.


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Not mad, but mated

Trent and I just got back from a week in Hawaii and this is how good it was: I forgot my blackberry there. I think it was the best vacation I've ever had. I reconnected with old friends, made new friends (which almost never happens given the antisocial tendencies my husband and I share), spent invaluable time with my husband sans Nugget, drank in inexpressibly gorgeous nature at every turn--from rainbows to sea turtles to lava rock strewn beaches to canyons to waterfalls and on and on. And, most importantly, I did not do any work at all. None. Which may be a first for me since I started my current job: a real, uninterrupted vacation. I attribute it to the magic of Kauai. I want to go back, immediately. Nugget can come this time. But I think I'll leave the blackberry here, just in case.

I got a little tired of people asking me whether it was hard to be away from Nugget. Of course I missed him, but it really was not hard. What's hard is nurturing my relationship with my husband while raising a toddler and working insane hours. Taking a vacation together without him was as much for him as for us -- he needs his parents to be have a strong relationship so we can be a loving family for him. Not that I said any of that to anyone. Maybe I should have.

I got my baby fix there from a scrumptious pair of six-month-old twin boys that belonged to my friend's sister. They were the most consistently happy babies I have ever seen. They may have been drugged. Or on the payroll of the Society for the Advancement of Reproduction, dancing us all down the path to procreation with their siren song of sweetsmelling, chubby-thighed contentment and then WHAM here comes your own newborn with a nasty case of colic. Babies. They are tricky little devils. But I'm onto them.

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sound and fury

Yesterday at the beach Nugget pointed behind me and said "broken." (Actually it sounded more like 'bwoten" but I knew what he meant.) I looked and saw a man sitting under a tree, with nothing broken apparent around him.
"What's broken?" I asked Nugget.
"Man."
"The man is broken?"
"Man. Broken."
"That's sad," Trent said.
"Broken man sad." Nugget repeated for the next several hours.

Encouraged by this evidence that children possess unique psychic abilities, presumably because they were between lives so recently, I started questioning Nugget about whether he remembered meeting Jesus. The only response I got sounded like "hmmmm." Which probably indicates that Nugget was under orders not to share his knowledge of the universe with nosy parents. Trent's response to my questions was more articulate: "you're scaring me."
I'm so excited that Nugget has reached the age when he says amazing things. Finally, it's his turn to entertain us. I may actually get around to blogging once in a while now that he's feeding me material.

Which reminds me of an incident both Trent and I meant to blog about several months ago but neither of us ever got around to. (Reasons not to marry your perfect match.) Trent and Nugget came on a business trip to San Francisco with me (note to my employer: but I didn't charge any of their expenses to the client and I worked very hard). After I finished working very hard, we wandered around the Haight and got coffee at a little cafe with sidewalk tables next to a large mural painted on the wall. The mural looked like a rainbow from far away but up close you could see that each band of color was formed by a throng of creatures, a different creature for each color. It appeared to depict evolution -- the first band was amoeba-like organisms, then fish, amphibians, through to humans, and finally what I took to be angels taking flight. Two drunk/high hobo/hippie types (I think the Haight Tourist Authority was paying them to be there) stood in front of the mural discussing it with great reverence. One said the different bands of the rainbow represented stages of life, and that the angels--which he called ghosts--symbolized death. "Shhh," said the other one, indicating Nugget playing nearby. "Don't let the kid hear." As if death were a naughty word that must not be spoken before the children.

Earlier we had heard this delightful pair discussing Cherokees. Specifically, they were discussing whether Cherokees exist. "No man," one insisted, "Cherokees aren't real. They're like Eskimos." Whereupon further argument ensued. Terrible and yet so awesome.