YOU'RE READING MY DIARY

BUSBOYS AND POETS?

Before last week, I had never been to Busboys and Poets, the DC "community gathering place" where you can eat and read (my favorite pastimes). So when Mr Bee woke up on Sunday and suggested I take two hours away from the kids to have coffee by myself somewhere, I got dressed and ready in 10 seconds flat, grabbed my laptop, and rushed to the new Busboys and Poets location in Takoma, DC. When I got there, the place was packed, but I saw one free tables in the café section, albeit with a few dirty cups from the previous patrons. I asked the hostess if I could sit there and plug my battery-pauper laptop, and she said yes. Ten minutes passed with me standing in front of my dirty table, so eventually I picked the cups, put them on the bar, and sat down only to realize there was no outlet to plug in my laptop. The waitress finally came and acknowledged the lack of outlets. We looked at each other in the eyes for a long instant, and then I told her I would go somewhere else. As I left the place, a little confused and a little sad, I realized the last thing I expected from a place called "Busboys and Poets"  was to have to bus my own table and leave. So the only appropriate thing to do was to write my own poem as well. That'll teach them.

Dear hostess,
Are you useless?
Or just smarter than me?
'Cause I cleaned up your table
And did not get my tea.

DONE WONDERING

MicroBee is in the sunny last line. 

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of boredom, I was perusing the apps on my smartphone when I opened the "baby" folder and found again The Wonder Weeks, the companion app to the bestselling infant development book of the same name. For those who might not be familiar with it, the Wonder Weeks are ten stages of mental development that all infants go through on their way to becoming accomplished toddlers. A Wonder Week is an amazing mental "leap" during which your child becomes magically able to master new physical, mental, and emotional skills. Unfortunately, each Wonder Week is preceded by an exhausting period of extreme, unforgiving, back-breaking rage and neediness from said genius child that I believe the authors were too chicken to call The Month of Shit. It is the other side of the infant coin. In any case, according to the app chart, my 18-month-old MicroBee has finally emerged from the rollercoaster of mental growth-spurts that are The Wonder Weeks. So I guess my parenting will be downhill from here. *pats own shoulder* 

BIOMETRICS BUMMER

I'm currently in the process of becoming a US citizen, and the second step, after submitting all of the paperwork, is getting fingerprinted and photographed for the so called biometrics. I went through this process once already when I applied for my green card, and the experience was marred by my assigned officer complaining multiple times about my "greasy, greasy thumbs" that were preventing her from collecting my fingerprints. This time, I arrived all clean and made-up, and with perfectly degreased thumbs, only to be told that my bangs could not be in the photograph. I had two hairpins with me, but no mirror, so I started pinning my bangs back blindly with very poor results. How do I know the results were poor? Because this time my assigned officer had a laughing fit while looking at my image on the screen. And when I told her, "I don't want to see how I look," she answered, "Yeah, YOU DON'T WANT TO SCARE YOURSELF." Oh well, so much for my hopes of gaining that world-famous American confidence through naturalization. I guess I'll be the eyesore in America the Beautiful.