Yeah well just to get me by

I have too much to post about. Nothing fascinating, but enough to block me up. Blogging is one big constipation metaphor. I need Choco-lax.

The other night, the same night that Marc and I drove back from Saturna, we went to a party in West Van with my parents. (Anybody who reads this blog must already know that I like spending time with my parents. My parents are cool. Shut up.) The party was at Doug's house. Doug is a writer and an artist. If you live in Vancouver you hear a lot about him, so much so that I don't even want to use his full name in case literate hipsters google him and end up here, which would be very sad. In any case, he's a friend of my parents, and he has an amazing house. I'd read/heard a lot about it, and it was great to finally see it for myself. It's full of art (the kind I like), and books (I like), and Lego. Everybody likes Lego.

In the middle of the "living room", or "conversation pit", (whatever people in the 70's called the place where they'd have key parties), there was this plastic statue of a super deformed kid with its arms stretched out. It looked a little like a Kewpie doll and a little like those "Bob's big boy" statues that loom over burger places in the States. It was wearing actual clothes, which was kind of disconcerting, and its hair was black and shiny like a helmet. Towards the end of the party my parents, Marc and I were all sitting on a couch facing the statue. My mum was slightly drunk with wine and smiling away beside me, and I pointed to the statue and told her that my dad had wondered, had actually asked me, if it was a real boy.

My dad was talking to the person next to him and wasn't listening to me so he didn't hear what I'd said. I could see my mum figuring straight off, on squinting at the bulb-headed statue, that it couldn't be true, but then she wavered, as I'd hoped she would, and said "No he didn't?" Marc was listening but didn't know if my dad might have actually said something like that and politely kept quiet. I was laughing and stamping my feet on the floor. This is my favorite kind of joke. The kind that makes no sense at all, that can only really work on a drunk person. I just loved it so much that my mum wasn't sure if her husband had mistaken this hideous child doll for a real boy. Stuffed? Paid to stand still? Full body death mask with grotesquely swollen head? I have no idea what she was thinking. Finally she grabbed my dad and asked him if he'd thought the statue was real. He shrieked "No!" in the high-pitched girl's voice he sometimes gets when he's surprised. Of course that made it even funnier, because to him it had come out of nowhere, and I was gasping on the couch when Marc said "Claire! Were you lying?" which made me practically bust a LUNG, I laughed so hard.

Num. I looked after Ivy today, and on the way home from the play gym I found a pretty beat-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle doll lying in the entrance to an alley. It's stuffed, missing its mask and belt, and it once was Donatello, the "according to my calculations" turtle, but I'm going to turn it into Leonardo, my favorite, the mature turtle leader.

Sure it's no desitute hamster, but the ninja turtles who are mutant teenagers were a big deal for my generation, alright? I don't feel that I have to explain my art to you, Warren.