The Wormlips Scrapbook

Lulu was home for a few hours on Sunday but she didn’t have much time to hang out because of an obligation at 5:30 sharp. She had an instance.

What’s an “instance”? you might ask. I have no idea, but it has something to do with killing monsters. For an hour she hammered frantically at the computer keyboard while strange sounds emanated from the speakers. I ignored World of Warcrafts’s electronic growls and zaps, but perked up when I heard real-live men’s voices.

Please stay tuned for general rebuffing. Get your unstable flasks; they’re only good in here. Greystone Cartel: can you hear me now?

I think she said the term for these guys is “raid leaders.”

I’ll do a 3-2-1. Keep it nice and consistent. Soul well’s up. Please get your candy.

I’ve never heard full-grown adult males with wives and children talk like this.

Okay for a read-check. Please give Mr. X applied. Ready for the pull. Krotch is in a really odd spot. Watch out for him.

The more riveted I became, the more it annoyed Lulu, whose Personal Space I was invading as she innocently tried to concentrate on killing pixelated things.

Chakka back up. Pull the blind eye back. Skull is down. Ranged to kill Krosh. Kill Moon first. Take him down! Okay, everyone can go on Triangle.

Eventually I got bored with scribbling notes and decided to go buy an ice cream cone.

“What kind of ice cream do you want?” I asked Lulu, who remained myopically immersed in the game.

“Pauldrons.”

“What?!”

“Shoulders.”

Sunday’s Lesson: Never try to talk to someone who’s in an instance.

Monday’s Lesson: Don’t try to eat dinner while you’re watching Interview with the Vampire. Every time I took a bite of food, some guy would start slurping on someone’s spurting artery. I had to shut the TV off altogether when Tom Cruise sunk his fangs into a rat and squeezed its black blood into a wine glass.

Today’s Lesson: I can’t decide if it’s “Check your calendar each night so you don’t sleep through a forgotten appointment” or “In a vampire movie, the worst is never over; even though the rat scene is past, don’t try to eat dinner while watching, particularly when dinner is spaghetti with tomato sauce.”

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Here’s the story of Yo-Nenny’s second tattoo. She got it about a month after her first one, when she’d just turned sixteen.

I went straight home after getting my first tattoo, looking for inspiration for my next one. I got the idea off a mirror that my brother gave me from The Met. I looked in my backpack and I had this teeny little hand-mirror and it had this design on the back of it, of Hokusai’s The Wave.

This is when I still actually cared about what the tattoos looked like. I wanted it to be attractive and meaningful. I’d seen the design a thousand times before. It didn’t speak to me but I realized I could put it on me and then I’d have another tattoo. It satisfied my need for a tattoo that looked somewhat interesting.

In the back of my mind I knew it was silly for me to get something like this because I thought of it so quickly. But because it was my second tattoo, it meant so much less.

This tattoo resides just to the left of her first tattoo (the lotus), on her left shoulder. I asked her why she chose that location.

It wanted it to be easily hidden but still easily visible. I think it shows how impulsive I was. The first one I spent a lot of time getting it exactly centered. This one I just slapped in on my shoulder. Since then I’ve tried to balance out my tattoos. I’m funny about symmetry now.

Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave at Kanagawa from A Series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji circa 1830–32 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)

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A few days ago I hiked up the Marin hill to an Obama precinct-leader’s house, where I picked up some promotional materials: “Women for Obama” bumper stickers for Lulu and her friend Esmeralda, a sign for my front yard, and a poster for the gecko’s cage. Gecka, normally complacent, got all excited about her new decoration. For a full five minutes she cruised back and forth trying to climb it. I’ve never seen her get so excited about a presidential candidate.

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Unlike Gecka and me, my sister has been actively supporting Obama since the earliest days. Yesterday she took this photo of him in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the moment of truth has almost arrived. “I shook his hand, while holding a diaper, so he might touch it for posterity. I told him, ‘it’s clean’ and he laughed…” The other photo shows her with grandson Ryan at her local Obama HQ.

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