One of 3 Fire-Orange Dragonflies Who Live at Our Pond

Excuse the iPhone autofill typos

Peace, and Music, on Earth

This sounds so cool! I wish I played a musical instrument with any skill or passion.

I’m looking forward to the result. Should be cool.

New LA Moms Blog Post 2

Diversity: The Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE).

Cutie Nubbin –> Unreliable Narrator –> Hiro Protagonist

When my son was a toddler, I called him my Cutie Nubbin. He was round and chubby and oh so adorable.

As his language got more complex, his grasp of narrative, sequence, cause and effect more nuanced, I called him the Unreliable Narrator. He’s guileless–never once did I ever get the sense he was trying to snow me. (Then again, he’s more mischievous than outright naughty.) Instead, he would tell me what he thought/saw/experienced, and if it was wildly inaccurate, implausible, or simply a fantasy, I think it was because the boundaries between wish and happenstance were permeable. I explained a few times what “telling a story” was, and “pretend” vs. “what happened in real life,” and I think he got the drift pretty quickly. In fact, last year’s teacher as well as this year’s teacher both told me that if some cry-making event happened on the playground, the UN could actually be relied upon to be a fairly impartial and accurate reporter of what occurred. (He was seldom the cryer or cry-maker.)

The Unreliable Narrator period coincided with the Thomas the Tank period, which I at one time loathed and yet, perversely now, look back on with nostalgic fondness for the simplicity of play. (HA!) Oh, sure, there were lots of train crashes and explosions, but there was also lots of good fun setting up elaborate slightly piney-scented interwoven tracks. And mercifully there were no guns in Thomas.

Rather suddenly this year, in July/August or thereabouts, the Unreliable Narrator glommed onto Star Wars (I admit–I have only myself to blame for this as I introduced him to it). Around this time, a family friend gave the UN a Star Wars Lego game, and combined with the many Star Wars Legoo shorts as well the full length feature films he watched, all forms of media converged into full-blown Jedi-itis. Plus, he was Yoda for Halloween.

Also around this time, we were burglarized.

I think the two were not entirely coincidental–his intense cathexis with the Star Wars universe and the burglary.

I’d seen him struggle with some slightly older boys who picked on him last year. Maybe it’s a sign of how sheltered a life he leads, or maybe he’s very very lucky, but I think until he was almost 4, it never occurred to him that other people would dislike him or wish him ill. Until then, he was showered with affection, affirmation, doted upon, cherished, regarded as charming and delightful, took joy in other children’s company and was in turn enjoyed by others.

So to encounter “bad, mean people” was quite unusual for him.

And so it was with the burglary. I think HB and I lost a little of our aura of omnipotence when that happened. He saw that we were upset and disturbed, angry, victimized, unable to get our things back. (My laptops were stolen; it was like having my hands cut off.) It made a huge impression on him. “Bad, mean people” could hurt the adults in his life too. Disturbing.

Just the other day, he mentioned that he wished he could be all-powerful Yoda so he could “protect us.” He built a house with Kid K’nex sticks, and it had blasters attached to it, “for protection…to keep the bad guys away.”

I think the POV of whatever character he assumed in his Star Wars Lego game also helped suture his sense of self more firmly into that of an avenging superhero (like Spiderman, another favorite character).

He rarely plays the role of the “bad guys” in Star Wars–though he does find Anakin’s tranformation from good to evil fascinating.

Instead, it seems to me that upon observing injustice, his strong desire is to restore justice. He’s more fully pro-active in his pretend play; as a friend once said about her children, “at a certain age they sort of stepped into themselves.” And now I see what she meant. The key difference between his Thomas the Tank play and his Star Wars play is that he imagines himself in the Star Wars universe but he manipulated the Thomas universe. Thomas was satisfying because it was a synecdoche for the world; he needed to be loom large over it and move it around with his hands, whereas most of the time the world loomed large over him and moved him around with its hands.

In late summer, it’s as if his imagination suddenly jumped into hyperdrive–as a natural consequence of his own developmental clock, nudged along by slight trauma, and a solidifying sense of the tribe of “mama, dad, and R.”

So with this latest twist in his development, I’ve seen him molt the old skin and grow into the new.

Which is why his new pseudonym here is Hiro Protagonist, “last of the freelance hackers and greatest swordfighter in the world.”

I think it’s big and roomy enough of a pseudonym to last him quite a while, don’t you?

And Yet More Road Trip Haiku

*I added this post in afterwards, out of some bizarre completionist, hyperscrupulous impulse I don’t understand, to have my whole month of November filled. Why? No idea. A sensible person would’ve just said, “fuck it, so there’s a big gap in my nonexistent NaBloMoPo.” But I guess I’m unreasonable. So that’s why everything is in purple green.

We hit the beach on our way back home. It inspired more haiku.

Surf flogs sand, flicks it

Bullwhip seaweed hastens thud,

Of mares’ hooves to shore. #tweetku

My Cali-born son loves the beach. Winter or summer or any time in between.

Kids love beaches, waves

Liminal, fresh from unknown

Amniotic roar #tweetku

Sometimes just looking out the window will spark something. We had a particularly beautiful full moon recently.

The moon, a lozenge

Melts on the tongue of night, lick’d

To flat, sharp sliver. #tweetku #haiku

I submitted that last one to a haiku contest where the first prize is a MacBook Air. They announce results tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll check–years of entering contests for things has led me to the “assume NOT” attitude. I figure, if I won, someone would email me. If not, I’ll have to find some other haiku contests to enter. Even if I won, maybe I should find some other haiku contests to enter.

More Haiku

*I added this post in afterwards, out of some bizarre completionist, hyperscrupulous impulse I don’t understand, to have my whole month of November filled. Why? No idea. A sensible person would’ve just said, “fuck it, so there’s a big gap in my nonexistent NaBloMoPo.” But I guess I’m unreasonable. So that’s why everything is in purple green.

Sometimes all I have time to write creatively is a haiku. I don’t mean to trivialize what haiku is, the difficulty of writing a good one, or imply that it’s brevity makes it a minor literary form in any way. Not at all. As Mark Twain said, “I’d have written a shorter letter but I didn’t have time.”

I simply mean that to gather the powers of observation and still all the inner noise that makes it hard to hear the poem, it’s sometimes hard to carve out a little bit of the best meditative state in the middle of the chatter and bustle of everyday life. It takes a different part of your brain to write up your losses from theft for the insurance company than it does to think out a poem.

I know I said previously that I was askeered of twitter. Well, now I’ve given the Twitterverse ample opportunity to be scared of me.

I invented something called #Tweetkus and post those whenever I have a spare minute.

Haikus that were originally Tweetkus:

Quick, deep nectar sips

Hummingbirds skim flowers; delve

A blossom’s essence. #tweetku

A more traditional haiku, with a focus on nature.

Elsewhere leaves turn, here

The pond’s lily pads yellow,

Drown in tropic heat. #tweetku

Likewise.

This Tweetku–

Vicious, or resigned?

Hard times rain down, first soft–Then,

Force to knock teeth out. #tweetku

–led to this MOMocrats post.

And then:

Fall, & the spice of

Apples. Funk of wet leaves, mud

Perfume of cider. #tweetku

Wordsworthian Composition

*I added this post in afterwards, out of some bizarre completionist, hyperscrupulous impulse I don’t understand, to have my whole month of November filled. Why? No idea. A sensible person would’ve just said, “fuck it, so there’s a big gap in my nonexistent NaBloMoPo.” But I guess I’m unreasonable. So that’s why everything is in purple green.

I had a professor in graduate school who tried to make the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake) more interesting by arguing that the natural world, and Wordsworth’s rambles through the Lake district with his sister Dorothy, were integral to the composition of Romantic poetry. She succeeded. I for one thought the professor’s argument was quietly brilliant in removing the strange act of literary creation away from what we think of as normally a static, seated process and instead, a mobile, dynamic one.

Just throwing off the shackle that goes from around the table leg to yours is an exciting idea. I think I’ll start my day with a walk around my block every morning, for one.

Of course, it can be hard to walk hundreds of miles to attend a wedding and write poems, but that’s what a quiet car and a PDA is for. Plus, this is America, and like Jack Kerouac and the neo-Romantic Beat poets of yore, a ramble through the bucolic English countryside has been updated to a scenic drive up the 101.

Some haikus I wrote while on the road:

Kid’s lapidary

Questions have smoothed brain grooves, worn

Holes in my eardrums #tweetku

Um, not quite a nature poem.

Cadences of Seuss

Syncopated language fun

Pop-art for the ear. #tweetku

Nor is this one. But these are new-fashioned haiku.

Bookstore’s wood pew, good

For musing koans, poems,

Soul concordances. #tweetku