Sex with squeaky clean hair

There’s a book (not new translation) on the KamaSutra by James McConnachie called The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra. I currently own five copies of the KamaSutra, my first being the Richard Burton translation. Actually, that was a bad beginning since Burton confused rather than edified me. And it wasn’t the Victorian English--it was because all the sage advice regarding seduction, usually began with “shampooing” various body parts. All the impromptu (and extensive) shampooing fairly boggled my mind until I got my first year of college Sanskrit and realized that “shampoo” was probably “champu” i.e. massage. So much for my impression that those lusty ancient Indians had squeaky clean hair.

According to The Guardian review, McConnachie’s book depicts the KamaSutra as an anti-feminist male fantasy--I wonder if he’s seen the Wendy Doniger translation, which attempts a decidedly feminist take on sexual pleasure in the KamaSutra.

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Rights and wrongs

In the dialogue between asserting universal human rights and assertive identity politics, it usually boils down to a tussle about FGM--how far are you willing to compromise your beliefs about human rights to endure an ethnic minority’s systematic injuries to its female young? Here’s yet another illustration on those similar lines: Women Lose in Mexico Indian Rights Gain.

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CRUSH

You say:

It really does happen
when
you’re not looking

Swept Away
Blindsided
By Accident

I wonder:

Why
you keep thinking
it’s a bad thing

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Labor, Love

I’m looking for a part-day nanny for Baby A. More like a parent helper, really--the plan is that I’ll stay home and write while they entertain baby for three to four hours. But I die a little bit each time a woman says she’s able to watch my baby since her baby goes to daycare.

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Fried Eyeball

A splash of boiling oil to the right eye. Excruciating. Pain.
Big A gave me some Erythromycin goop that helped immediately and thanks to percocets I’ve been having dreams with incredible parades of long-ago, long-lost friends.

Friday Update: Saw the doctor who says I’m ok, won’t go blind, and don’t even need glasses yet. (sigh on that last one : / )

Friday night update: Awesome how the body heals--the burn mark on my eyeball has completely disappeared! Still *bleeping* hurts everywhere else though.

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(Whisper) Hallelujah!

Baby A has begun to grudgingly acknowledge that there is such a thing as bedtime. I used the genius Pantley no-cry sleep solution (mostly, anyhow--I nixed the journal, for instance). So now she’s quite reliably asleep by eight or nine in her crib and stays that way (with a couple of half-asleep feedings around 1 a.m. and 5 a.m). Niiiiice!

Up until a couple of weeks ago, she’d wake up at 2 a.m. and be all, “Dude! Party @ my crib!!!” and I’d be wincing/thinking/saying, “Babe, please just go to sleep, already!” Now I have cuddle time with Li’l A at his nine p.m. bedtime and cuddle time with Big A at… I don’t know--let’s say, 3 a.m., which is when he’s been getting home this past week.


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A Dark and Stormy Night

L’il A’s writing a book. It’s called “Out Grown.” Chapter 1 is called “The Thing in the Sky.” The first lines:
Blue and Red and Purple lights flashed 8 times, thunder 16.
(Sorry if you thought me counting was geeky.) It wasn’t a normal
night.

Last night as he climbed into his loft bed, he shot me a smile over his shoulder and said, “I want you to be my editor.”
Ohhh!
Awww!

STFU, Bulwer-Lytton Contest Organizers--sometimes there really are dark and stormy nights.

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