Appreciate or Else

The summer is over. I know because our summer guest has left.
She got, the day before leaving, "traveller's fever." She told me this so as to explain her sudden diet of dry bread, garlic broth and strange cups of tea.
She put chunks of ginger, two mint tea bags, and sugar cubes into one of those big Starbucks coffee cups. The soupbowl sized cups. And then drank it, cold, all day. The tea looked greasy and green. Apparently that is also how she looked at the airport. Eva doesn't like travelling.
I'm talking about Eva, the mother of the father of my child. My mother-in-law, but I don't really like that title. It's too accurate. And Eva, or as I call her in the privacy of my mind, "She Who Communicates in Mysterious Mutterings," is never an accurate communicator.
She did do a lot of housework. The house SHONE. Hugo ate off the floor a few times and it was cleaner than the table is now that she's gone.
And she loves her grandson. She spent a solid month playing with him, trying to teach him Czech, fretting about his bumps, farts, rashes, poops, naps. I'm glad he has so much love.
And there is nothing like really getting to know your in-laws to really get to know your spouse. Holy Insight.
I appreciate Vita a lot.
And I love my baby.

Drool to Be Happy

Every time I think I am losing any academic competence, something good happens.
I mean, something like a scholarship or a nice email from a smart and scary professor happens. This time around something even better happened - I finally understood Deleuze.
Deleuze is a dead French philosopher. Ah, Gilles Deleuze.
Gil, I call him, for short.
I've been reading and writing about Gil for 4 years now.
I think that everything I wrote about Gil, up to this past week, was wrong.

Last week I was laying bed, Hugo drooling to sleep on my tummy, and as I drifted to sleep myself I thought, "Damnit, Gilles Deleuze might just be total nonsense. Maybe it is all baloney he just made up and nobody really understands it. Maybe Gil is the snuffalufagus of post-post-structuralism."
And at that blessed (I mean blessed in a strictly immanent, atheist sense) it kicked in.
I saw in my sleepy mind an image of a herd of elk.
And I recalled Gil's passage about nomadism and deterritorialization.
And the elk, smelling a bit like horses and a lot like dust, deterritorialized as they ran, as they moved, loud and warm, as one.
Which means I finally figured it out.

In no way does this mean I can explain it to anyone yet.
Wait another 3 years for that.

Inexplicably happy, I am now writing about it all. About pine beetles, lodgepole pines, the Chilcotin, MacBlo, moose, elk, trappers, loggers, tourists and trains.

And Hugo is still drooling. Happily.

bestestest

We went to Enderby to see M and A and A and M's Dad and significant other.
It was really really purty there.
The river is cool and wide and fresh, and the trees were tall and leafy and shady.
Hugo was happy the entire time and he slept the whole way there and back.
Mucho happiness.

Friends are the bestest.

kakakakamamamamdadadada

Ah yes, time flitters by and my baby gets cuter while I get more shrivelled looking.
"It's all worth it! I had 32 years of solipsism! Who needs to look good? Who needs to ever wear jewellery again? Who needs to remember to wear deodorant?"
Except for the last item, I'm cool with the changes parenting brings.
Hugo is so damn cool. Last week I let him play with a potato. He yelled his super-happy yell and hoisted that sucker all around the house.
And he tries out new expressions every day. Today he was closing his eyes - squinting them - when he smiled. Kind of like a fake-smile with a laugh.
One day last week he said two new words in one day, both at the right time for the words to actually mean what they mean. Both were Czech, and both words now mean either water, poo, duplo, dollie, boob, bunny, book or parent. I think, basically, Hugo has moved from Chomsky's structuralist notion of language aquisition to a more Derridean deconstruction of supposed static semantics. Boy genius.
Plus he poops in his potty.