A Litany of Small Fun Things
Year-end edition
In keeping with the end of a truly horrible year, I’ve committed to spending the next few weeks reveling in small discoveries of joy.
I spend all Saturday shaking a cup of slowly melting ice near a baby’s head so his parents can try clothes on in the dressing room of a Muji. He can’t figure out what the sound is and stares at me like I am some kind of magic. Two hours ago, the sight of me made him cry, so I am chalking this up as a win. The rattling changes as the ice liquifies and condensation drips on the baby’s head. Does he know what rain is? How much do babies understand of our world? His mother says: a lot. I read online that babies don’t really remember anything till the age of three. We went through this the last time we met as well. It took five hours for the baby to warm up to me, and now he stares at me like I’m a stranger or witch. An endless cycle of enlightenment and forgetting. The important thing is that the baby doesn’t cry. Shake, baby, shake.
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The cat I live with looks at me funny too. Cats, they’re always giving off mixed signals, but I think I’ve got this one figured out. If she sits near you, you have to look at her sideways, and if you accidentally catch her eye, you need to blink real slow. According to this cat YouTube video I saw, it means I Am Not A Threat. I do it a lot, drawing out those three-second blinks, and it seems to work, but then one day I try fluttering my eyes at her, all flirty-like, and she doesn’t flinch either. Turns out whatever I do, she’s not impressed. There’s a kind of freedom in knowing you’re already a disappointment, a kind of freedom in knowing you’re harmless, no matter what.
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Apparently it’s the opposite with dogs. That’s what everyone says. Apparently the love they give you is excited and unconditional. This is why my partner wants one. I ask him why he needs unconditional love from an excitable being when he already has me. He laughs and laughs and laughs, and when he stops, he looks at me and says, oh. You were serious.
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I don’t have a good sense of humor. Or perhaps the right thing to say is, I don’t have an accurate sense of humor. People say it doesn’t matter as long as you’re having fun, but then they get mad when you laugh out loud in the middle of a horror film. One time, at the cinema, a stranger turned around and said, if you don’t stop laughing, I’m going to tell the ushers, I’m going to have you thrown out. He was so mad. I couldn’t help it; I snorted so hard tears rolled down my cheeks. It’s not a medical condition or anything, but when I get going, I really can’t stop. Last year, when Joker was showing, a friend texted me; she said, don’t be offended but that reminds me of you. Why would I be offended? I asked, but she didn’t reply.
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They say if you explain a joke, it loses its power, stops being funny. But there is so much we don’t understand. How we morph in the eyes of babies; the language of creatures dependent on us; the direction affection flows in. Why some things stick in our minds and others don’t. Why it is that when I sit cross-legged in my kitchen, watching an ice cube defrost slowly on my palm, the feeling going out of my fingers, something as simple as the cat feeling safe enough to come over and take a shit across me is enough to make me cry. I don’t get it, my sister says. But love isn’t contingent on comprehension. Are you having a good time at least, she wants to know, and I say, yes.
