Rough Week

It's been a rough week around here. Rejections all around. Plus some additional rejection that I wasn't even looking for. I mean, I go out of my way to get rejected for the most part but sometimes, rejection seeks me out. And bureaucracy. I had some. I wanted to apply for a grant because I like rejection but it turns out the university would like to protect me from myself and prevent that from happening by inventing and installing a device called grants and contracts which makes sure absolutely nothing can happen--even rejection--which is usually so easy to come by.

But it's amazing how resilient one can be. Yes. I will pat myself and the we's in my house for our resilience. And then I will say that kids are a good source of resilience. A) Even when they reject you, you can roll your eyes and tickle them and then you are quickly returned into most-loved status and b) they want so much (not rejection) that it's hard to get mired in your own morass.

Mas is curious. Possibly dangerously so. He likes to look under the stairs, crawl to the middle stair, fling himself off the stair onto the tile because he wonders what that might feel like. That we told him it wouldn't feel good is not so interesting to him. The humans yammer. The tiny bits of Starburst wrapper on the floor speak to him in a language he understands. Mostly--eat me. You can't hold him without him trying to crawl over your shoulder to see what everyone else is doing, including himself in the mirror or how, if you're holding him while you pee, he might propel himself into the sink to see exactly how the drain might work. Perhaps best by tonguing it, he thinks. The computer is good for typing but even better for pulling the keys off the keyboard and the pencil is good for drawing on the floor and stabbing yourself in the eye and if you're not a curious creature, however will you figure out that eye stabbing and floor drawing are equally interesting although perhaps one is more fun than the other.

So the week sucked enough that I sang Paul Simon's American Tune without irony. Also, Bob Dylan's Hard Rain although I don't know all the words. Tonight, I'm resilient enough, I think, that I can sing Frog went a Courtin to Zoe although only after we read Wigger--William Goldman's kid-story about parents who die in a car crash and Susanna holds it all together until a robber steals her blanket (Wigger). Then she cries. Then she's told to stop crying so she starts to flood. On the inside. But in the end, the undertaker adopts her which means it's a happy story, similar to this one.