harpy's blog

I was as ready as I could be to go it alone. I had begun to get used to the idea of his being mostly out of my life. And then, two days before I left Florida he tells me he's made a terrible mistake and that he wants to try again. Suddenly I arrive back in the universe I recognize.

So, here I am, back in Chicago. Back to being a housewife, a stay-at-home-mom. Back to making grocery lists and endlessly picking up toys and books. I was ready to make a radical change, imagining this new unknown where I would have to push and push and push myself, no matter how I trembled and tired. Part of me was excited, but most of me was terrified and somewhere in that process I must have made a wish. And now my wish has come true.

Next Wednesday, Henry and I will bid farewell to the lizards, the 87 miles walked within the mall, the humidity, fire ant mounds, dripping Spanish moss, ubiquitous strip malls, confederate flags and punishing heat as we (with help from my dad) make the three-day drive back up to Chicago. And to be honest, I'm going to miss Florida. A little. Many good things happened here: I reconnected with one of the coolest girls I had the luck to befriend in junior high (and she's five times as cool now), I grew closer to my best friends in Chicago than I ever have been, I read a lot of great books, got to see my aunt and uncle for the first time in at least 10 years, treated myself to two good CDs, came to understand my parents and their issues a little better and did a lot of mighty fine hand-sewing of new garments that I'm quite proud of.

My best friend Liz has been sending me care packages of zines while I'm in Florida. This saves my life. With the first package I got, I felt this great satisfied joy as my hands held xeroxed newsprint. It was like I was back home.

Tiny Unicorn - A comic with many, many words and one teeny unicorn. Our bitsy pal is a lot like you and me -- it watches TV, gets cranky about LA heat, slaves for minimum wage, smokes, buys stuff at IKEA. But mostly it likes to comment Andy Rooney-style on all sorts of goings on from the political to the hallucinatory.

You Don't Get There From Here #2 -- Hot damn, this comic was dense.

I pushed Henry around and around and around a massive distorted circle and I thought about the article I read in Adbusters yesterday as well as the subsequent reader comments. I thought about how it really isn't enough to just identify how the current incarnation of liberalism is a joke or to play the game of oneupmanship with your fellow oppressed or even to buy the t-shirt sold at the radical gift shop. There has to be a solution. I mulled this over as I passed plastic shoes and headless male manequins with their facsimile crotches baaarely peaking out of cargo shorts. Hubris to think I could come up with a workable solution, that I could be the innocent child who deftly plucks the needle from the huge bale of hay every one else is demolishing feverishly. Where's the lynchpin? Is it that we need to talk to our neighbors to sate the loneliness and isolation that draws us to malls like the one I'm circumnavigating? Is it that we need to slap accusatory stickers on billboards to reveal the deception behind the capitalist spectacle? Get rid of cable TV? Bomb the shit out of each other? Destroy religion? Beg states to seceed? Boycott all stores?

What interests me about Florida is actually a caricature of Florida. It's the excessive absurdity and jury-rigged kitsch -- the hand scrawled signs warning of hell fire or boiled peanuts, the bizarre museums, the residents who look lean and leathery and thoroughly salted, the overhyped billboards that inflate a tiny t-shirt outpost into a dazzling spectacle not to be missed. Without all this wax-museum oddity, most of Florida is drowsy and rural or just as sprawling and consumeristic as the rest of America. Of course, I can't speak for Miami or the Keys. I've never been there but can imagine it a more Hollywoodized, sparklier version of everywhere else. By and large, though, I try to stay as far from Florida as I can.

Henry and I are visiting a friend this weekend in an area I'd never been to before -- Naperville and Oswego. Sweet jesus, the burbs really are as bad as They say. I'm homesick for the city. I'm also freaked out because I'm going to be submitting my resume to a prospective employer sooner than I reckoned, specifically Monday. If that doesn't work out, then I'm Florida bound likely by the end of the week. Either way, I'm a complete mental mess.

For being in the midst of the worst time of my life, I had a pretty great mother's day. The highlight of this was attending the indie publishing event at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of my favorite people were there, there were many free things to be had, I learned yet more ways corporate culture is insidious and icky as an STD. Sure, I got the flowers and the obligatory cards and a delicious breakfast, but it was so rewarding to get out there among the punks with my little man and prod my creative possibilities just a little.

It's also nice to fill my mental subversion coffers before I head down to my personal wasteland -- Florida.

It started with Hop on Pop. The copy I have is the one I read as a child. Sometimes Henry gets into it and wants to read it over and over, although he often ignores it. He's actually memorized some sections. Anyway, one evening as I read it to him, I noticed the character Mr. Brown introduced with his wife. We then follow Mr. Brown through various events but wife never returns -- he doesn't even bother to invite her to his snack soiree with the hirsute Mr. Black! Must have been a business lunch.

And then there's the generic family of Mother, Father, Sister, Brother and Other Brother featured at the end of the book. Sister praises the reading prowess of her brothers and her father but never mentions her own or her mother's ability to read. Eh?

There’s no zealot quite like the newly converted. And I am a relatively new convert to the absorbing world of knitting. Now I have about three separate knitting projects lying around in various corners of the apartment. I sneak in a few rows while my son is lost among his trains and trucks. I neglect to pick up snippets of yarn coiled here and there on the sofa, the floor. I count my birthday gift of vintage knitting patterns as one of my favorites.

So, you know I got all kinds of excited to pick up a copy of the newest Slave to the Needles (issue #3). There’s an extensive series of interviews with crafty indie musicians, the requisite Vegan recipe, a couple of skill explanations, comics and enough patterns to keep you busy until the next issue arrives. I will confess that it was a specific barn bonnet pattern that sold me on this issue. Will this bonnet elicit compliments of cuteness or will I be mistaken for a Mennonite? My only gripe with this issue is that I would have loved to have had a little key to some of the more esoteric abbreviations used in the patterns.

I have been mulling over the last issue of Bust for a month or so now. Specifically, I think about one particular article – the one about choosing not to have kids. Now, I love my son more than I ever thought possible. But I know and will wholeheartedly agree that not everyone should have kids. It does not define being human and certainly is not the end goal of womanhood. Unfortunately, the Bust article seems based on the idea that folks with kids cannot wait to proselytize parenthood and think it their goal to make sure those who choose to not have a child feel devastated and guilty about their choice.