Stefanie Posavec’s work. (Via Information Is Beautiful) Look at the Writing Without Words projects (some prints of which are for sale).

Todd Hido’s photographs. I’d only ever seen the photos of places and buildings and I found them richly mysterious until I saw the portraits, which somehow made the images of the spaces seem thinner and more static. I still find them very beautiful, but wish I hadn’t seen the portraits. I can’t help populating the spaces with the inhabitants of the portraits and it kills something to know who lives there (American Apparel models).

Alice Finslippy, who bothers to defend herself again, even when she shouldn’t have to.

Amy Martin’s winning poster for Public Option Please.

~

All the two and a half year old wailing and gnashing of teeth and shouting for impossible things like potatoes from Costa Rica or a ripe pineapple is grinding me down. Something’s up right now. It feels like Aure’s on the cusp of something new and is resisting it with all his might. He loses control entirely if anyone mentions potty training or asks to change his diaper. In between rambling stories about imaginary injuries and exquisitely articulated opinions (“To-be-perfetly-honest, I prefer a lot of honey—a huge, a monstrous honey! on a spoon with ghee. Please!”) he insists he’s a newborn baby and needs to be swaddled and held while he fake cries. I’m confused, but probably not any more than he is.

Sometimes I see what he needs and still some part of me rears up in front of that and shrieks that my head is pounding and I can’t think, and I become paralyzed and cold and filled with disgust with myself that even in those moments when it should be possible (i.e. I’m not trying to work), I can’t always bring myself to do what I can see he needs so badly. He’s only two, he can’t control himself, and he’s begging for my help. And worst of all, he imagines I’m not holding him every minute because he’s not acting happy enough. He gags and hiccups, snot and tears everywhere, in a useless attempt to calm himself, choking and stuttering that he’s “so calm now, so happy and tranquilo now.” How did he learn such a thing? As for the other times, this is the thing—there’s never any telling myself that it’s good for him to have me walk out the door while he weeps himself sick. It has to be done, but it’s undoubtedly bad for him. He is shaky and clingy for days afterward. When I drop everything and give him my physical presence and all my attention, he morphs back into his baby self—gregarious, silly, full of questions, and interested in strangers. He actually needs what he says he needs. I can’t give it to him, but it’s not because I don’t believe he needs it…

And after I wrote all that, the lovely woman who babysits in the mornings arrived with her two children, and the three of them began to coax him into showing off his special magnetic blocks and singing a bit, and after a while he asked if he could use the potty and proudly did for the first time and apparently that’s the extent of potty training because he hasn’t gone back to diapers at all. He is suddenly calm and cheerful and normal again as if the decision had been weighing heavily on him for weeks. Huh. Cue end of maternal anguish and ebb sheepishly away from the previous paragraph’s melodrama. I feel like I stomped down on the last step and it wasn’t there… This is why parents should not be left so strictly alone with their own children and children shouldn’t be left so alone with their parents. Which reminds me, I recently learned there’s no use fussing over extended family and the Dissolution of American Life as it turns out increasing residential mobility is a myth, but still something feels lost in the way I live.