7 Thrilling Takes

7 Thrilling Takes April 21, 2017

I don’t really deserve Quick Takes after a lame-o week of blogging, but I’m going to have them anyway. So sue me. Actually, please don’t sue me.

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One
This is truly brilliant. I have watched more disembodied food video hands this week than at probably any other moment in my existence and the refreshing flair of this one is truly wondrous.

I really have not been able to pin down what is so mesmerizing about the food video. I have not once spent a minute and a half watching anything that I would make, ever, so why do I Always Pause? Why? I ask myself.
Two
This has been kind of a slow week around here. Some days I haven’t managed to drag myself out of bed before noon. I wake up at the usual time and then just stay, for an entire half day, propped up on my pillow just Thinking about getting up. But then it’s luncheon so I do get up and hobble downstairs and sit in a chair. The tense fast pace is probably going to kill me.
Three
But Wednesday was seriously exciting because while we were sitting pleasantly in our Binghamton Garden, watching a plane flying back and forth across the cloudy sky dragging a large banner behind it, a green and white banner indicating the availability of new student housing in the place where new student housing has been being conspicuously built for many a long month, and Matt saying out loud to me–‘Wow, there’s a new housing development for college age students next to the university, how should we get the word out? What forms of modern communication do we have at our finger tips? The telegraph? The pony express? Paul Revere and his midnight ride? The telephone game? What should we do? Oh! I know! Let’s get a plane and fly a large banner behind it.That’ll fix em.’–while he was saying these cruel things and scrolling through, well, the Internet, the man in the house behind us was engaged in a riotous game of Hit the Golf Ball With a Hockey Stick While Shouting Loudly. We sat and listened to this heretofore unknown pastime for a while and then retired to the indoors. More specifically to our Very Well Positioned upstairs sunporch with the picture window where we stood, all of us, for a couple of hours watching the fascinating unfolding drama of our neighbor, who may have had slightly too much to drink, drive his car out of his drive way and into the opposite curb whereupon the kind, compassionate, and extremely patient Police of Binghamton chatted with him for the rest of the afternoon. We watched transfixed, of course, but with no sound. But still, the youngest child announced, when everyone seemed to have drifted away, ‘This is way better than TV.’ Which just goes to show you how bad television programming has gotten to be and how someone should do something. Really.

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Four
I’m referring to this astute and well reasoned article and why I Will Not be watching the new Anne of Green Gables and if you try to show it to my children I will burn you with my piercing and terrible gaze equal to the fury of a thousand suns. You think I’m kidding? I am not. If you show that series to my children I will wreak a havoc upon you like unto Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy. You can tell it’s wrong just by looking at the expression on everyone’s faces in the previews. No. No. No. A thousand times No.
Five
Really, if you want realism, you can just keep plugging through the Bible, and then temper it with the Odyssey. The child, head cocked to one side, trying to work out the hapless Odysseus making his way home to his wife, and yet every hinderance involving a beautiful woman and inconveniently losing all your own clothes in the ocean. ‘O come on,’ says the teenager. Followed up with, ‘As if.’
Six
Really, having these two teenage people (what am I supposed to call them?) is eerily reminiscent of the toddler period. Not that they behave like toddlers. I’m not saying that. But later childhood is possessed of a charming competent independence. The child from 4 to 11 is busy and not really underfoot, too wrapped up in careening from one side of the cosmos to the other, yelling and bashing his way from one discovery to the next. Whereas, I suddenly find myself wedged on the couch practically draped in two people who are basically the same size I am (!) and who are trying to insert themselves into everything that I’m doing. Elphine, because she knows it drives me crazy, won’t do anything without coming to tell me about it first. Then she stands and simpers, lowers her laughing eyes and says, sarcastically, ‘If that’s all right with you.’ It may seem like a nice gesture, but now enumerate to yourself all the things that a person does in a day. All of them. And then interrupt every single one of those tasks with the refrain, ‘If that’s alright with you.’ At some point you will find yourself shrieking, ‘I have No Opinion Whatsoever about what you wear, what you eat for breakfast, if you need the loo, which math problem you do next, how many cups of tea you’ve had, for the Love of All that is Good and Holy (which does not include that new Anne abomination) just Do Something without telling me.’ Child then retires into a satisfied silence, having won. What I don’t know. That’s part of my problem.
Seven
This morning I’m going to retreat into my own baffled silence to paint the church kitchen. I’m not taking anyone with me. They can all stay here and chatter away at their father, who, I am sure, has nothing he’d rather do than just listen, occasionally interrupting the discourse to admonish the gathered throng to Stop Screaming. Go check out more and better takes. It’ll be good for you.


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