Had another chance to chat with DadWagon friends Dermot and Dave, who now officially have the #1 radio show in Ireland’s biggest city (no doubt DadWagon’s first interview helped push them past the competition). Anyhow, this one is about my recent cri du coeur in defense of letting babies watch Star Wars.
The interview starts at 15:30.
The danger signs probably started appearing long ago, but I missed them until yesterday morning. That was when, in what is becoming an increasingly contentious process, I tried to get Sasha dressed for preschool. The kid, so normally fond of her velcro sneakers, refused to let me put them on, and kicked and screamed so much that, finally, I had to give her a Time Out. I carried her to her room—one shoe on, one shoe off—put her in her red chair facing the crib, and closed the door while she cried.
In the meantime, Jean and I got ourselves ready to go, and fretted about this punishment: Was it meted out too easily? Would it even work?
It turns out it worked—too well. When I fetched Sasha from her room a few minutes later, she was sweet, apologetic, and compliant—the perfect adorable toddler. As I led her down the hallway, she stuck her stockinged foot in the air and said, “I forget my shoe! I forget my shoe!”
This, my friends, was the danger sign. Before, Sasha was distractable. If she was upset about something—our refusal to let her watch “Yo Gabba Gabba” till after bathtime, say—we could always point her attention in another direction, and the previous object of her fixation would disappear.
No longer. Sasha remembers! Why, this very morning I came up against the same reluctance to get dressed for school. This time I tried a different tack: bribery. If Sasha got dressed, I told her, Daddy would give her a gummy (a chewable vitamin that Sasha considers to be candy, which is why Jean and I don’t want to indulge her too often). She agreed, and I figured that after we’d gone through the long process of assembling an outfit, the gummy would have been forgotten. No such luck. As soon as she was dressed, Sasha took my hand and declared, “Let’s go get gummy!”
I know I should be pleased with the kid’s newfound ability to remember and concentrate. Memory, after all, is the basis of self. And it is fascinating to watch Sasha transition from feral toddler to almost-personhood.
But instead I’m anxious. If she’s really forming memories now, then what do we need to beware of? What capricious actions, which once we could get away with, do we now have to curtail? And, most important of all, does this mean I have to start wearing pants around the house?
What the drunken baby was for physical comedy, this is for intellectual humor. Amazing entry from Alberto González Vázquez for the No Todo Film Fest. And if you speak Spanish, a double bonus to be able to behold how the “child” in this short film uses every ounce of the lyric brutality that Castillian cursing can provide. I want to be this kid when I grow up.
[Special props to my friend and uncle Carlos, who helped teach me to swear in Castillian and has suffered my blunter phrasings over the years, for sending this along. He knows me too well.]
How it starts:
Father: Listen, Javier, I have something important to tell you. Um, Santa doesn’t exist.
Javier: What the fuck are you talking about?
Father: Calm down, Javi, I know it isn’t nice to find that out…
Javier: Are you INSANE?!
And off it goes…
Today we are attempting to get non-blog work done. Behold, then, this brilliant trailer for “Las Palmas” by Johannes Nyholm in lieu of regularly scheduled content. I, by the way, will be seeing this entire movie many, many times when it is released over here. In the meantime, if you are in Sweden (Nathan Hegedus, you out there?) the whole film will be shown at the Market Art fair in Stockholm tomorrow through Sunday.
