From Dooce this morning, a long, rambling aside which was totally unrelated to the original subject at hand. This amused me because I tend to actually talk this way sometimes.
Oh, and you want to know the worst things they do, those evil babies? They catnap. Like cats. Or maybe not like cats, I wouldn’t know, I’m allergic to them and have never lived with one, except for that one time I spent a summer in an apartment with four Korean women who would not ever stop trying to convince me that kimchi is in any way edible, and when I went out of town one weekend they locked a cat in my room and it pooped on every surface including my pillow, you know what that is, right? The place upon which I rest my delicate head to sleep, oh I am still angry about that one and often bring it up in therapy. Do cats take short naps? I DO NOT KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION, but I do know how to answer the phone in Korean.
Also, once when I was living in LA, I used to get my nails done every couple of weeks at this tiny place run entirely by Koreans, and YOU KNOW they are totally ripping you apart and criticizing your choice in footwear and going NOT THIS BITCH AGAIN, but you have no idea what they’re saying because it’s all in Korean. And THEY KNOW they have the upper hand. So I’m sitting there and all the manicurists are firing off paragraphs to each other in Korean about the alarming shape of my chin, probably, and I sort of quietly look up and whisper, “Hello?” in Korean. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE PANIC IN THAT ROOM. Dude, they all stopped and froze in place, and they all slowly looked around at each other like INTRUDER! INTRUDER! And my manicurist goes, you speak Korean? And I say, well, a little bit, yes! Yes I do! And I’m not even kidding, no one in that room said a word for ten straight minutes. OH MY GOD, THE POWER!
Heather Armstrong is one of the writers that I would probably categorise as a “mommy blogger” but I still read anyway because she’s smart and funny and foulmouthed and deeply weird. I totally respect that. Normally I would run a mile from a parenting blog, my eyes glaze over when people talk about their children, and when I see a baby being shown off by proud new parents I generally have to hide my initial response which is “Fuck me, what is that? An alien? A frog? Did you mate with a demon? Because that’s surely NEVER a normal baby!” But then I smile and coo and tell them what a gorgeous baby it is, just like a regular person. :)