Andrew Sullivan has, again, expressed my thoughts more clearly than I ever could. Please read his response to the Obaminator’s speech tonight. The speech was so powerful, so moving, so epic that even Bill Kristol, who is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun on the political spectrum, said positive things about it.
SMOOZE.
Yummy ice pop thingies. Coconut and Mango. Coconut and Passion Fruit. Coconut and Pink Guava. Mango and Pineapple. Oh yes.
Even TWGH, who claims to loathe coconut, loves these. My kids, even She Who Will Not Eat Anything Containing Natural Ingredients, love these. I deeply, deeply love these.
I don’t know where to get them other than Whole Foods, so of course my grocery bill has now quadrupled and I will soon be living in a cardboard box in the parking lot of Whole Foods. But it might be worth it.
The limbo of the Patriarchs is something a lot like purgatory as near as I can tell, but I got a little lost in the original sin, Good News, “harrowing of hell” hoo-ha to make much sense of it.
The limbo of the Infants is just too skeevy for me to even discuss. I will only briefly note that after I read about it, I contemplated chucking some dishwater on my unbaptized kids’ foreheads while I was doing the dishes as a way to hedge my bets.
So…yeah. The whole Catholic limbo business is a little too murky, not to mention macabre, for me.
Limbo comes from the Latin limbus, which means edge or boundary. More specifically, limbus means edge or boundary of Hell. See how they do that? You can only get away from Roman Catholicism for a teensy bit…like one sentence, before they round you back up again and put you in…I don’t know, maybe purgatory? Hopefully not the Hell of the Damned.
I have thoughtfully provided (you’re welcome) an aggressively technicolored video of David Hasselhoff, adored by Germans don’t you know, singing an utterly banal song about the limbo dance.
The limbo dance, I am told by Wikipedia again because my capacity for actual research is a bit limited at the moment, originated in Trinidad. Perhaps you’ve seen drunk people perform the limbo at a social event or in an ad for Club Med, or small children playing limbo at birthday parties, who, come to think of it, often act like drunk people, only smaller. To “dance” the limbo, one must bend over backwards to fit under a stick without falling on one’s ass or touching the stick. I just giggled when I wrote that. It’s true. I’m very immature. “Touching the stick.” Get it?
Neo, in the movie The Matrix, which I hated with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns, finds himself in limbo – which turns out to be geographically situated in a subway station, whatever – between the Matrix and the Source.
And, of course, Harry Potter is saved from death by the Horcrux and has to choose between life and death. (Big surprise: he chooses life).
My very intellectual and verifiable source known as LazyGirlWikipedia informs me that, colloquially, limbo is “any status where a person or project is held up, and nothing can be done until another action happens.”
NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE.
I’m not Catholic, German, a Club Med vacationer or drunken toddler, a fan of crap science fiction movies, nor am I a wizard. I guess I’m going with the colloquial definition of limbo.
My vacation at the beach was spectacular, but it was limbo. I felt sure that my sense of suspended animation would abate upon my return home AND TO WORK OH MY GOD WHERE DID SUMMER GO, but I was mistaken. Most sadly.
As the wise poet Chubby Checker once queried, “Limbo lower now. Limbo lower now. How low can you go?”
My daughter is four and a half. She is beautiful. She is smart. She is funny. She is hell in a pink tutu if she doesn’t get her way. Often, because her father and I have essentially thrown in the towel, she gets her way. She’ll probably have rickets or scurvy by the time she reaches five due to the lack of certain vitamins and minerals in her all carbs all the time diet.
At the beginning of the week at the beach, I watched her stand at the water line. Over the course of those seven days, she gradually moved further away from that boundary between sand and water as she splashed and dove and tumbled in the waves. La Princessa is going to a new school next week, a fact she has been told and claims to understand, but can’t envision. She’ll be leaving the solid sandy strip that holds all the friends and teachers and routines she has known since she could first walk and I am holding my breath.
Just as I finally managed to weep myself dry after he finished kindergarten, my son is beginning first grade. My daughter, not unlike her mother, expresses every emotion she experiences in real time. My son, however, is a ruminator. He chews on a feeling for a good long while and only expresses it when he knows that he’s ready to fully digest it. He is also incredibly even tempered and easy to be around. I’m sorry, did I say “is”? I meant to say, “was until late June when he became moodier than a PMSing middle schooler who’s just lost cell phone privileges.” Upon the occasion of his disturbing personality quick-change act, I did what any good parent would do, I freaked out. As a consequence, I have been a nervous wreck. As a consequence of that, TWGH has had to deal with me being a nervous wreck and has, just possibly, caught some highly contagious “freak out” germs. As a consequence, I’ve been all over this kid like white on rice. As a consequence, he’s even more moody and irritable and tense. Well done, mom. Well done.
The thing is, he’s in limbo. He’s finally copped to being nervous about first grade, and when I get off my freak-out hamster wheel for more than twelve seconds at a time, it’s abundantly clear that this magical child is caught between being my little boy and being my ever-so-slightly less little boy.
In the wonderful wacky world of public education, school usually starts for students the day after labor day. The teachers, though, go back to work the week before. So on Monday morning, I woke up painfully early and dragged my exhausted, though quite tan, carcass to school. I have Friday off, so tomorrow will be my last day to prepare my classroom and get my ducks in a row before THE TEACHING begins. And I am in limbo still.
However you slice it, like my children, I am neither here nor there. Together we stand on the edge. Await the resurrection. Anticipate the uptown express train. Contort ourselves to fit our new situations.
Don’t move that limbo bar
You’ll be a limbo star
How low can you go
How low can you go
