2004-04-08 - 9:35 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Tommy Can You Hear Me?" The Who

April 5, 2004

I'm going to tell a little story. It is kinda gross. If you have a sick sense of humor, it is also rather amusing. It involves violence and cannibalism in very small animals.

The delightful child of two of our dearest friends (a friend of ours in his own right) decided to enter a science fair kinda thing, and chose genetics as his topic. His plan was to buy a boy mouse and a girl mouse in different colors, mate them (apparently it takes 21 days to produce baby mice) and see what colors their kids turned out to be.

Well.

One day they discovered the boy mouse in two pieces. Decapitated. Perhaps his mating skills left something to be desired.

Turns out at least he performed his evolutionary duty before he died. The girl mouse girl mouse did, indeed, produce babies.

They didn't last long, though. They (ahem) disappeared. And they didn't have hair yet, so we know they didn't, say, escape.

At this point, they took the mouse back to the pet store and he switched to some new science fair project, but it's kind of a shame. If it weren't so sick and disgusting and frightening to the wee chilluns at the school, it could've been turned into a fantastic study on psychotic mice.

April 6, 2004

Last night I made what may have been the grievous mistake of listening to "Tommy Can You Hear Me?" about five times in a row. I don't know if I'll ever get it out of my head now.

For some reason -- either because the recordings are usually old or because of a lack of lower-pitched sounds I can make out clearly -- I have a hard time hearing The Who. So it took me that long (I finally realized I should be listening to the bass guitar, and the voices should follow from that) to track the key changes in the song.

Anyway, this all started because a few weeks back Poindexter bought "The Kids Are Alright" on DVD. We watched it down in the theater room on the 5' screen. It was just fantastic. I have never been to a concert, and probably never will go for fear of damaging my ears even further, but watching the concert scenes with the people nearly life size and my husband rockin' next to me was probably as close as I'll ever get, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

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The other night, Poindexter and I were both supertired, and after a little pre-sleep chatting I got the ritual "Why is the light still on?" and had to turn the light off and I really didn't want to sit up to do it.

After the light was off, I said, "Hey! We should get a clapper! Then I don't have to get up to turn the light off!" I was quite pleased with my brilliant idea.

Poindexter, however, squeezed my arm once, to say "No." ("Yes" is two squeezes, and three squeezes means "I don't know" or "maybe", depending on context. This works great for my post-lights-out yes/no questions, and as those of you who know me can imagine, there are a fair number of those.)

I said, rhetorically I thought, "Why not? It'll be great! You don't even have to wait for me to turn the light off, you can just do it yourself!"

Then he started shrieking, so I put my mouth up to his ear, and he told me what he'd been yelling: "Why do you ask me questions when you can't see me to hear the answers?!?!!" But I can hear him if his mouth is right at my ear, so he said he was concerned about random noises triggering the clapper. I think it's pretty specific, though, to the point that some people can't even clap right to trigger it.

Does anybody out there own a clapper? If it works, I want to get one. I can just see the two of us having a clap-on/clap-off argument over whether it's time for lights-out yet or not. :) :)

April 7, 2004

Recent city sightings:

Today while driving down 17th, I saw an ordinarily-dressed white guy with a mohawk that was dyed Ronald McDonald red.

Yesterday they were doing some filming around Rittenhouse Square, and I was horrified to see that they'd brought in a snow machine and sprayed snow everywhere along the edges of the sidewalks. Not what I want to see when the weather is finally turning warmer after winter keeps coming back for a futile "last" stand. The funny thing was that the snow was pure white, rather than the icky gray and black it actually is after being shoveled. Otherwise it looked quite realistic, as though it really had been shoveled to the side.

I drive up and down the same two streets every day chauffering Poindexter. Fairly often, I see a midget woman walking to work. I am evil in that I am fascinated by unusual specimens of humanity, but I refuse to feel guilty for three reasons:

1. Models are freaks of nature too and we all stare at them.
2. If you want to ask me nosy questions about my own freakiness (my deafness), fire away.
3. I would not treat this woman differently from anyone else just because she's short.

Anyway, one day I was waiting for Poindexter to come out to the car and she was walking down the street right in front of him! I was all, "Dude, you stood at the traffic light next to a midget!" He didn't seem to share my excitement, calling me a "Wacko" and trying to change the subject.

Also, there is an old, bent woman who lives in one of the apartment buildings around Rittenhouse Square. She comes out in the morning, dressed in her purple sweats, and does her power walking around the square. "There's my girl!" I yell. "Lookit'er go!" It's particularly impressive because she's so frail and bent that you'd think she could barely move, and she's out therepower walking. I'd love to introduce myself to her and tell her that she's my hero, but that would be a little weird.

In other Philadelphia news, I happened upon my to-do list from when I first moved here and was pleased to discover I'd done most of them:

1. Start skating again.
2. Join the local skate club.
3. Visit the Eastern State Penitentiary. I like the modern ruins; Poindexter will like the history of violence.
4. Visit the Reading Terminal Market. Eat.
5. Visit the Italian Market. Eat.
6. Take Poindexter through the giant model heart (the right size for a 220-foot-tall person!) at the Franklin Institute.

Well, #1 and #2 have dropped off again, but I did skate that spring and went on a city skate with the club. And I haven't taken Poindexter through the heart yet. But have done the following:

1. Visited the Mutter Museum (, this is a MUST if you haven't seen it already)
2. Taken a trolley tour of the city
3. Visited the Liberty Bell
4. Seen an IMAX film
5. Visited the SS United States
6. Visited the submarine and iron ship on the Delaware
7. Taken the ferry to and visited the aquarium in Camden
8. Visited Betsy Ross House and Elfreth's Alley

Time to create a new list. Here we go:

1. Visit the Art Museum
2. Skate alongside the Schuylkill
3. Walk the Ben Franklin bridge (there's a pedestrian area, up above the road, I think)
4. Visit the Museum of African-American History (flash site, ugh)
5. Visit the Atwater-Kent Museum (Philadelphia history)

A general to-do item is to explore neighborhoods. I love to do that. Now that the weather is warming up, I should just take the bus to a new neighborhood once a week and wander around.

April 8, 2004

Camille, your comment in discopete's journal made me think you might enjoy a movie I saw last weekend. It's a Swedish film called "Together" ("Tillsammans"). It shows a bunch of hippies in Sweden in the 1970s, and it is absolutely hysterical in making fun of really radical, intense hippie types. The movie seems to be promoting a more balanced view, a happy medium between repressive traditionalism and "if it feels good, do it". It's also very well-acted (even by the children in the movie) and looks like it was actually filmed in the 1970s even though it was actually made just a few years ago.

I was so immersed in the feel of the movie that when we left the house to go return it to the video store, I was discombobulated and having trouble adjusting to the fact that I was in 2004 Philadelphia, not 1975 Sweden.

And then crossing the street in front of me was a 60ish guy with long gray hair in a ponytail wearing a beret and a Che Guevara t-shirt. I couldn't believe it. I laughed 'til I had tears in my eyes.

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