Blake’s out with his dad for the night and Mason is out visiting Sage. This is the time on a Tuesday when being home alone with the baby starts seeming like a life sentence rather than a blessing. To be fair, I was taken to the mall this morning so that I could buy Blake a collared shirt, so I haven’t been housebound and isolated all day. It’s just that it’s hard to stay excited about eating leftovers and finding ways to fill the time while the sun goes down and the temperature drops.
I’ve been reading Street Gang, which bills itself as “a complete history of Sesame Street” but should be amended to read “a complete history of the performers and the first five years of development, after which the author obviously got tired and decided to skim over the intervening thirty years until everyone started to die.” I bought the book for Mason this Christmas, and got interested when he started telling me about the bits he was reading. As much as I love fiction, there’s just something about social history that totally grabs me. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at sharing books, as we tend to want to read at the same times. Also, Mason will often not finish a book if he knows I already did, so I’ve been trying to downplay my interest in Street Gang. I’m very nonchalant.
I also spent much of December reading and re-reading three of Dan Savage‘s books: the Kid (which I read for the first time shortly after Blake was born), Skipping Toward Gomorrah (which I picked up while waiting for the Kid to be returned to the library), and The Commitment (which was the last to come in, and which I read something like three times before it was due, partly because it was fascinating and partly because I was trying to keep my hands off Street Gang). I end up doing a lot of reading while I breastfeed, so I need a steady stream of original material or it gets real ugly around here.
I hear the baby, so it’s time to stop writing and get reading.
