another day in the parenting mines

sibling fights in Minecraft

The other day, it wasn’t yet 8 a.m. and S was complaining about J. “He’s always ruining my world,” she said. I asked how, and she meant in Minecraft.

J had set off an explosion that ruined the water slide she had built for her house. J wandered into the kitchen, sensing his involvement in the discourse.

“Stop turning everything to vines!” S said to him.

“He turns things to vines?” I asked.

“YES. And he’s always filling my inventory with junk. Cow meat, great! Pork, great! End crystals. Great.” She threw her hands in the air. “So I put it all in a chest and bury it.”

“You bury my stuff?” Said J, his eyes turning into dark splodges with pixelated gleams.

“What are end crystals?” I asked, putting down my coffee in the real world and moving across the Magic Eye floor to the coordinates of the impasse.

“You need them to defeat the Ender Dragon,” said J. “You get them from the void.”

The void, I already learned, is the end of the universe, where people turn into skeletons.

I searched end crystals, and this is what the internet said: “End crystals now drop from skeleton trap horses and can be placed only on obsidian or bedrock.” Aha. Also: “End crystals that spawn naturally in the End biome cannot be picked up by the player, making crafting the only way to obtain them.”

J says he didn’t mean to blow up S’s house, but he was blasting for bed rock … a place to store end crystals, I see now. It all makes sense. When he says he is “busy,” this is what he means. It’s can be 2 p.m. and he is still in pajamas and hasn’t picked up the army men he stationed around the floor, but on a different level, he has been diligently preparing to fight off the dangers of the night. This is why you have to give children the benefit of the doubt: there is usually some very legitimate bullshit they’re thinking about when they do something you don’t like.

It can’t be easy to come along partway through the game. J is18 months younger than his sister, and insists that he was in the womb with her, but waited longer to come out. The world started with both of them, he is sure. Sometimes he will be sitting on my lap, and S will come over and want to sit on my lap also, so I’ll put him on one leg, and her on the other, and it takes about 1.001 seconds of tussling over the midline of my body for them to escalate to a physical fight.

S doesn’t remember a time before having a brother, though his arrival must have been her introduction to the concept of limited resources, to scavenging and storing precious things away, delineating her private space, brick by brick.

I ask whether they have to share the same game or profile. “Can’t you log onto different games? Is there only one world?” I ask. S says that everyone is in the same world, though there are different biomes, and plenty of space in each biome. “He doesn’t have to build his house right next to mine! I moved in the first place because he wanted to build right next to me. So I started in a new place and then he FOLLOWED me there.”

I see it there in the cubey virtual space, that little hand always in contact, keeping you from leaving him behind. A little brother skulking after his sister across the zigzag of lit-up squares, his precious crystals tinkling in the overcrowded inventory box.

(ghast tear)

*

the husband section

In response to my saying I’m jealous of his mileage: “I never get a runner’s high. I’m always miserable.” —Noodles

“‘Why am I like this?’ I asked Nick in the dark. But he was sleeping, like people do.” —from Sandwich, by Catherine Newman

what I really mean when I ask, ‘did you read All Fours?’

• I have the hots for Donald Sutherland (rip) and I’m not sure how to feel about it.

• I have reached an age where I’m frequently disappointed by salads.

• Do you think Georgia O’Keeffe ever looked down and felt the waves of her own breasts were a bit low, a bit prairie where there used to be a steppe?

• If I ever said anything that seemed bonkers, it was just a metaphor, no matter how autobiographical it might have seemed. Did it seem weird? It was art.

• I am, once again, considering bangs and need you to talk me out of it.

• It might not even be that Donald Sutherland is (was) hot per se, as much as he just had HUMANITY to him, am I just attracted to any form of empathy with legs?

• That might explain the attraction to Kacey Musgraves also.

• Like, I’m attracted to her feeling an attachment to John Prine.

• We have finally paid off Noodles’ student debt and must now start saving for our funerals.

• Also attracted to Jack Black. For years now!

• I’m about to buy a bigger “craft cart”

• How much Anthropologie wallpaper is too much?

• I bought the Fair Play deck, but the cards are still in the box because they seem like more effort than they’re worth. Do they still work if they’re just stationed somewhere highly visible in the house, like a warning?

• It’s time for me to shave my face Dermaplane.

• I had a really perimenopausal dream again last night

  
  the dream:

what was Japhs doing in school all year? we finally have an answer in the portfolio of work he brought home

Do you know Prime, the sports drink endorsed/funded by that YouTuber?

Japhs is a big fan.

Big enough to spend half of first grade creating his own fanfic series.

Here’s Primey buying some rainbow Prime.

Yeah! Prime!

Noodles: What if Primey is his IF?

goodies

You probably have a children’s book or two illustrated (if not written) by

Carson Ellis

. Her travelogue of a trip to Fiji is so lovely.

This essay by Mary H.K. Choi:

I wish I had knocked on his closed door when I could have. I was in my 40s and still hadn’t accounted for the fact that people could die before I was ready to present myself to them.

Sophie Haigney

is always doing good work, loved this vale for a small bar.

Witching hour on Goat Mountain by

Samantha Colicchio

—great.

With the Cusk discourse cresting once again, a tbt to this perfect lede from Patricia Lockwood in 2018:

The observation​ that some people do not like Rachel Cusk is so omnipresent in criticism of her work that it’s surprising no one’s ever led off a review with ‘I, too, dislike her.’

(I’m partway through Parade and mostly just feel certain characters are much stronger than others. I’d take a book just on being slapped in the head.)