I did go to McKinney yesterday. It was sort of drizzly-rainy but the weather was no worse than that. (My thoughts are with the people in western Kansas - how horrible. I hope that there are no other fatalities and all the missing people are either staying with family or are holed up somewhere).

I got to see the little "Cinco de Mayo" parade (for those unfamiliar, it is NOT Mexican Independence Day. Cinco de Mayo celebrates an old military victory of Mexico over France). It was mostly a few big pickup trucks with people sitting in the back, a couple of trailers of pre-teen boys dressed as mariachi musicians, one councilwoman, and several convertibles with teenaged girls (I would guess, close to quinceañera age) dressed up in fancy dresses.

What made me kind of chuckle is that ALL of the girls were doing the "beauty queen wave," where you cup your hand and rotate it back and forth at the wrist. I don't know if someone TOLD them to do that, or if they all got together ahead of time and said, "let's do it this way." Some of them were kind of grinning in a way that makes me think they were doing it kind of to be funny.

People make me laugh. As much as I get disappointed in people sometimes there are also lots of wonderful, funny, idiosyncratic things they do.


I did successfully find part of a birthday present for my mother (and I'm working on making part of it, right now). I also found baby gifts for a colleague who's expecting (well, those I bought at Target; it's truly shocking, what those little boutique-type stores think they can get for onesies and such. I wouldn't spend $30 on a t-shirt for MYSELF, and there's a lot more fabric involved, and I wouldn't anticipate growing out of it in six months. I mean, it might be one thing if they advertised that they were "sweatshop free" and "fair wage" garments but the boutiquey things were not clearly of that provenance).

I also bought some things for myself.

Like these:



I had seen these in a shop the last time I was there, and had resisted buying them then. "You're a grown-up," I told myself. "You're Very Nearly 40*, and you do not need drinking glasses with gnomes on them." And I told myself that I had the better part of a set of perfectly serviceable drinking glasses that I bought at Wal-Mart when I first moved down here - oh, I've broken a few (they're rather thin glass and are a hard shape to hold), and some got chipped around the lip and I don't like to use them any more.

(*It's funny how Very Nearly 40 has become kind of the meme I use against myself these days...I still, technically, have a year and three-quarters to go, but to me, that seems close enough. But then again...if as they claim, 50 is the new 30, then technically, I am the "new 18.")

But yesterday, I decided I wanted the gnome glasses.

They please me immensely. They are heavy, relative to typical drinking glasses. Bottom-heavy, so they are less likely to tip over easily. And they have a pleasing shape. And the rim is nice and heavy and rounded and feels good against my lips.

There are four different ones. On the back, written in French, is the gnome's name and a description of what he is doing (For example: Nestor qui dort for the sleeping gnome).

And you know? I have enough of the child left in me to feel like milk tastes better out of a glass with a gnome on it.

And that is, I think, part of the whole tired-of-things-having-virtue-solely-because-they-are-good-for-you think I was speaking of the other day. I don't NEED gnomes on my drinking glasses; I could more cheaply buy a new set of cheap discount-store glasses and use them. Or, for that matter, use the dwindling numbers of my old set until they are all broken.

And the gnome glasses require handwashing, so the gnomes don't wear off.

But they make me happy. And I've decided that rather than questioning my maturity for being made happy over something like a gnome-glass to drink my morning orange juice out of, I should be grateful, instead, that I can be happy over such a simple little thing.

And they DO make me happy. Happy enough that I feel they are worth what I paid for them.

And it's the same way about other things: making amigurumi makes me happy. Yes, I'm "too old" for stuffed animals, if you look at it in any kind of "reasonable person" light. But making them - and naming them - and coming up with funny little imaginary personality traits for them - makes me happy. So why not do it? Why close myself off from something that makes me laugh and helps maintain my fundamental equilibrium just because I'm "too old" for it?

I don't know...I always think of the amigurumi makers as "kids" in their late teens and early 20s, and somehow that's okay...but it's not "okay" for me, some 20 years older than them, to do it. And I need to stop thinking that way. Surely the toy designers who work for big companies, surely some of the pattern designers out there, are as old or older than I am.

It's kind of like my Eeyore watch. I wear a watch with Eeyore on it. I bought it against the counsel of a particular person, who argued it was "un-serious" for a college professor to wear a cartoon-character watch and that I should go for a plain Timex or something. But plain Timexes are not as much fun. And I have to say I have NEVER had a colleague or a student make an unfavorable comment about my Eeyore watch. (And if they did...it's really none of their beeswax, anyway.)

Again, it gets back to that making-it-up-as-I-go-along grown up thing. It seems like there are no longer any real "models" out there to follow - not in the sort of pre-ordained sense that the dollhouse family I played with had, or the sort of Leave It To Beaver of Brady Bunch or Moonlighting or whatever television show/movie you want to take that tried to portray grown-up-i-tude had.

And another thing...I mentioned reading "Supper of the Lamb." One of the points Capon makes in the book is that so much on this earth is "unnecessary" - for example, there did not need to be so many kinds of fruit. Or grape juice did not "need" to turn into wine. Or - from his perspective - nothing, really, needed to be created. But it was. In all its diversity, all its "unnecessariness." And he argues that we should celebrate that, that we should be thankful because God or the Universe or the Natural Law of Things (whatever you want to believe) works in such a way that there are so many different kinds of berries, or that grapes ferment to give wine, or that milk can be aged into cheese.

And I find that that resonates with me. Sometimes, things that are unnecessary but FUN are important to a full life. So I will smile when I take the glass with Nestor (qui dort) or Leon (qui joue a l'accordeon) down off the shelf and use the glass to hold my milk or water at meals. I could just as easily use a plain glass - or from that matter, if I wanted to be uncivilized, drink straight from the carton or the tap - but the little unnecessary gnomes make me happy.

And there's a lot to be said for little things that make a person happy.