zeldafitz

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Mrs. Puff Goes to Paris

I love you from the bottom of my pencil case…

I love those lyrics—“Song for Whomever” by The Beautiful South.

At dinner last night Nick said, “I want to be the ambassador to Thailand and win the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Talley ho!

It’s so weird to be shepherding someone through life who is so much smarter and more motivated than you are.

I said to him this morning, “What is that thing Mrs. Puff says? And he said, “ You mean 'Sorry I’m late class, I was driving into work and that whole I’m-going-to-be-doing-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing reared its ugly head’?”

Um, yeah. That thing.

Then Ian, who’s three, yelled, “YOU’RE GOING DOWN TUBBY! Next stop, Davey Jones’ locker!”

SpongeBob plays a big part in our lives.

As does Jean-Paul Sartre, naturellement.

I was reading this website of a guy who irritates me; he seems like the James Frey of the Internet, all these hokey quasi-sarcastic morality plays with canned “dialogue” and pat endings. And, as he was recounting another one of his suspiciously tidy life scenarios, he said to his co-worker, in order to explain the moral bankruptcy of mankind, “"Hell is other people,' I say quietly, quoting Jean Paul Sartre.” At which point I wanted to hurl my computer monitor across the room.

I mean, anyone with a half a keg for a brain knows that’s Sartre, even if it’s only instinctively. As in, who ELSE but a disaffected Frenchman with a tight beret would say something like that? Even if you don’t know who said it, there's always Grandmaster Google.

Here’s my Mrs. Puff dilemma, and I recognize that it is not really a dilemma. Am I starting to sound like JEAN-PAUL SARTRE?

Tres bien!

Anyway, I work for a polite, intelligent, highly motivated woman that I both like and respect. No need to adjust that monitor! And I am working on an truly interesting project that will, I hope, benefit many women. It’s a publication.

So this past couple of weeks I have been working with another writer and a graphic designer and I was also working with a graphic designer for my site (behold its glorious wonder!), and it was all this back and forth and creativity and working toward something—the professional equivalent of a simultaneous orgasm. Am I starting to sound like D.H. Lawrence?

Good.

So there’s no dilemma. And yet there is. But maybe it’s the stupid kind of “American” dilemma where we never know how to be satisfied and we just whine meaninglessly (Being and Nothingness!) about things because we are such an insipid immature culture that we have nothing better to do than compare our inner torment with a fat cartoon fish.

Hmmm.

I guess I could just kick Oprah’s erratically toned ass for EVER introducing the concept of LOVING what you do in life.

I suppose it's time to dust off the Gratitude Journal. Maybe I should watch a Lifetime movie too? Just to get the Gratitude Juices flowing?

Or maybe I should just read about what a shit Sartre was to his ladylove Simone de Beauvoir here so I can drop faux intellectualania around while I question the throbbing emptiness of the human condition, and my coffee cup.