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February 10, 1997
I'm enough over the flu to do errands and get my house back in order. Or so I thought.
The most important errand was a run to Petco for cat food. I decided to go the Burlington instantiation of Petco because it's near the mall and a Staples store so I could combine errands. I hit Petco first. I bought two 4 lb. bags of Hills Feline Maintenance for Cats 1 to 6 Years.
On to Staples for paper (for the printer - I was down to one sheet!), envelopes, and stuff like that. A brief stop at CompUSA for cable ties - I'm on a cable neatness kick. Seized by fatigue, I skip the mall and go home.
Wilbur is meowing madly urgently. His dish is empty. I've arrived with refills just in time. Except... wait a minute... this doesn't look right... it's supposed to be Feline Maintenance Lite! Where did I leave my brain? How could I have bought the wrong food? Yikes. Am I getting Alzheimer's? I give him a little of it anyway figuring it won't hurt.
I go upstairs and install Netscape 3.0 on the Mac. I reboot. Ooops. I didn't write down the PPP settings. Now I have no idea how to connect to my IP without their address... Boy, this and the wrong cat food. I am clearly not as recovered as I thought.
I decide I really had better get the right cat food along with some of the other items I forgot, like paper towels and toilet paper.
I go to the Peabody Petco where i should've gone in the first place. I buy the right food. I forget what else I came out to get.
On the way home I remember what I needed, stop and get it, and buy a new broom too.
Back home I feed his royal orangeness the right food. He calms down. I calm down.
I realize that part of the original FreePPP installation from my IP included a little script to run to reinstall MacTCP and restore FreePPP settings should they get corrupted. Moments later I'm running Netscape 3.0.
Moral of the story: make sure you are awake before buying cat food or installing Netscape.
Oh darn, where are the 1996 notebooks?
Later: Double Darn. I found January and March but not February... one shouldn't start vast projects with half-assed stacks of notebooks ... or something like that.
Found it! But apparently I didn't write anything on Feb. 10. So here is Feb. 9, 1996
Two babies side by side in car seats, the girl in pink, the boy in blue. I thought that went out years ago. The women's movement of the 70's made no difference to how we raise children. If anything the girls are frillier and the boys are tougher than they ever were. Do we even think about how or who the child really is? This is bugging me disproportionately since Andrea told me airplanes were for boys. She thinks in terms of toys for girls and toys for boys. Grandma paints the kids' toenails pink. [...] This is the same woman who has a number of lesbian friends (some of them kinda dykey), one of whom was a member of the original collective that founded New Words (a local feminist bookstore) yet she's painting the girls' toenails pink and buying them Barbie dolls. Barbie is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I suppose Barbie is better than the Might Morphin Power Rangers.
I am trying to imagine a gender neutral bedroom/playroom and I can't. These girls are so immersed in femininity their milieu is alien to me.
Web page. Gotta do a web page soon. Am becoming obsolete.
I wrote this at a week long Writing and Walking workshop with Natalie Goldberg. One of those 10 minute timed writing practice dealies...
Everybody here writes about their mothers. But I think you have to have a mother who is called "Mama" , not "the madre" or "Mrs. Egan". Kevin started that "Mrs. Egan" bit in college. The madre hated it. She actually got angry at him - telling him to stop it - it was disrespectful. Mostly we call her "Ma" to her face and "Madre" or "La Madre" behind her back. I think Kevin started that one too. Madre took Spanish lessons for years. She needed to be able to talk to hungry people - many of the hungry people in Boston speak Spanish mainly Salvadorian I think.
There's a Boston restaurant dialect called Salvadorian Kitchen Spanish. Most of the kitchen help is from El Salvador. When my brother Thomas came out at work he stated it: "Yeah, I'm gay. Don't tell the Salvadorans." The Salvadorans love him but they think he's straight. He speaks Salvadorian Kitchen Spanish, Columbian Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish all really well for someone who flunked Spanish in high school. Then again I think there was a year when he flunked everything.
Last year he and Steven went on vacation to Jamaica. When he came back he said he had actually missed speaking Spanish.