Cohesion schmaschmesion

I've had random thoughts flitting around this little head of mine for awhile, ones which may be best served as tweets. I can't believe I even typed that. Tweets? Seriously? Regardless, minor thoughts perhaps best served in 140 word blips. I do battle with brevity though, hence me thinking I can make an entire post of aborted tweets. To be even more annoying, I'm even going to abandon the notion of segue all together and go with actual bullet points. I owe you all big time.

-Child temper tantrums. I have one of those tempermental toddlers. You know the type - "No want 'nana Mum, want gwapes." mother gives child grapes "NO MUM! 'Nana MUM, NO GWAPES!" I can cope, most of the time. Ok, there was last Saturday when I desperately wanted to lock her in the car and walk away, but other than that, I have a fair amount of patience. I do not, however, have patience for the seemingly thousands of people who feel as if a screaming, tantruming child is the most unusual sight one may see when going about their day. Aliens are not landing. Elvis has not just sauntered down the street. It is just a little girl, inconsolable over a trivial issue, feeling as if she needs to communicate to everyone within a half a mile radius how upset she really is. This does not warrant blatant staring and head-shaking. I happen to think I'm quite a good mother, but even the best mother can't reign in a 2 year old possessed by perceived injustice.

-Basic, one minute a day yoga. Thanks to carrying/birthing the being mentioned above as well as having big ol titties, I have quite bad lower back pain. There is some kind of nerve pinching going on, so quite often my legs ache, even when I've not been doing anything physical. With the whole running thing occurring 3 to 4 times a week, I was struggling some days. I googled "lower back pain", and was lead to the cat cow progession pose, which, hello, LOVE. The first time I crawled into the oh-so-flattering cow pose, my ass stuck up in the air, ripe for mocking/come-ons by The Dude, I felt a crack. It was as if some blessed soul's gentle hands grabbed a part of my spine previously immune to stretches and back twisting attempts and lovingly tweaked it back into place. After a few minutes of the poses, I went running and it was completely pain free. Since then, I have done the progression pose in the morning and evening, et voila - no pain at all. This now means I can run every other day, or even on subsequent days if I so desire! I now preach the gospel of the cat cow progression pose like some sort of entry level yoga fundamentalist. I'm rapidly becoming a zealot in general - first this whole "new me" thing, now the yoga. I can change your life! Look into my eyes...

-My brother has found my blog. He wasn't looking, but my casual nature when using my Mom's computer when in the States led him to it. Thanks to Statcounter I suspected he stumbled upon it soon after we left the US, then my suspicions were confirmed last week when Statcounter told me that someone in a computer lab at his university googled my blog and read two posts. Conveniently, he had emailed me just moments before from a computer at uni and randomly started talking about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, last week's Music Monday subject. He assures me he doesn't read it much, and when asked if he reads the comments said, "No, I respect your privacy somewhat". What a dear. He told me that my Mom doesn't know about my blog, but advised me to be more careful in future. Always looking out for me, this one. Hey C - VAGINA! VULVA! CERVICAL MUCUS!

-I've just finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies", and I would like to hear others' opinions on it. I have this annoying habit of needing to be bombarded with the feedback of other people concerning most matters...music, movies, and books. Whenever I watch a film I go straight to imdb to read user reviews. With books, I trawl Amazon reviews.

I'll be honest, I didn't get this book. Pulitzer Prize winner? Really? Her? I admit I do sometimes struggle with the structure of short stories. I need a longer narrative. With short stories, I feel as if I'm just getting into it and then it is finished. In this collection, I felt the author was a bit too forced in her descriptions of Indian people and households from the perspective of the white American. I don't have the book in front of me, but it was observations along the lines of, "Their shoes were lined up along the wall - weird!!", "Mrs X had a funny red dot on her forehead - kooky!", "Their house smelled strange, with all the spices they used in cooking - how foreign!" I know the Americans characters were hardly the most wordly, but Lahiri attempts at getting the reader to learn more about Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani culture was too blatant, too forced. I will say that I greatly enjoyed the final story, which is ironic given my ambivalence toward the book in general.

I'm now reading Tom Perrotta's Little Children, which I'm devouring at a pace of knots. I only started it this morning, and somehow even in the midst of a busy day full of work, child-wrangling, and running, I have gotten to page 125. It's just such a straightforward, easy read, and I've not had that luxury in awhile. I worry that when I finish it, I will of course have to buy the DVD of the film version. This means heavy Amazon analysis of the book, then protracted analysis of reviews on imdb when I watch the movie.

-I love Johnny Depp. Just thought you should know.

-P's term officially starts tomorrow. She has been attending nursery sporadically throughout the summer, but as the private school her nursery belongs to begins their term tomorrow, her school year, as such, commences. This is usually inconsequential, but she is now moving up to the next age group, which means a school uniform. Yikes. The kid is 2 and needs a uniform. Ohai England and their love of uniformity (fight the power!). In her case it's only a sweatshirt or t- shirt with the school's logo and navy trousers/skirt, but it's a uniform nonetheless. That, and she's started wearing her hair in pigtails, or as she calls them, "ponies". Oh my god. I'm becoming one of those mothers and she's not even potty-trained yet. Send help.

Ok, I think I'm done now. Blogging is the domain of the self-absorbed? You don't say!