sweet juniper!

I am so tired of trying to write thematically-unified blog posts with not-quite-clever-enough titles and tidy conclusions. And Christ, aren't you tired of reading them yet? I worry that the way I write on this site has become so formulaic. Sometimes I finish a post and then wonder if it's real or if I have just written another parody of myself.

To make matters worse, I can't stop thinking about all the people who have recently discovered this site and its archives. My parents, for example, now know about it after three years of blissful secrecy. I don't know how they figured it out (and I'm still not sure if my dad reads it: he doesn't have much use for computers other than finding sweet deals for used car parts and tools on eBay). I also recently received an e-mail from my freshman-year roommate whose sordid sexual history and lousy laundry habits were detailed in a recent post. And now the nice Mormon girl I took to prom e-mailed me about the site this week. It was just so much easier writing here when none of the people reading it knew what kind of underwear I wore as a teenager.*

And I have to admit I have been struggling with the very concept of my life being remotely interesting to anyone. Sometimes we watch Intervention on A&E and I think, "Damn, that junkie's lived an interesting life. Why does a boring yuppie like me have a blog when your average meth addict is so much more interesting." Sometimes I wish I'd chosen a subject for this blog that people actually seem to find interesting, you know, like the Indian Diaspora or food. Most of these days my life is so boring I wish I could just invent a pair of meddlesome first-generation Desi parents or tell you about all my hilarious mishaps at culinary school.

Today, for instance, I did what I try to do every day: I avoided the interior of our home at all costs in order to prevent the kids and myself from making it look like the interior of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. You know: that building I've now milked for two posts, several dozen photos, and an appearance in Harper's Magazine? Seriously, what's up with that? Enough already! So today we went to the zoo.

And I totally forgot to put shoes on the kid.

Also, remember: I'm too much of a goddamn asshole to use a stroller. So I had to carry a shoeless three-year-old kid around the entire zoo with a shoeless three-month-old baby strapped to my chest. I also had all your typically-unnecessary baby accouterments stuffed in a bag over my shoulder (but no shoes). I felt like how the Joad family jalopy must have felt sputtering towards California. At some point this shoeless old man hitched a piggyback ride talking about how he was gonna git himself a whole bunch a grapes and squash 'em all over his face and just let the juice dreen down offen his chin but he really creeped us out so we dumped him near some carrion birds.

Then my radiator busted and all the children was hollering so I sat down on a park bench by the rhinoceros enclosure and said to myself twice, "At least the house is clean."

Now see: that story could have totally been its own Sweet Juniper™ blog post if I'd just added some reference to ancient mythology at the beginning or somehow figured in something about living in Detroit. Like, Hey, what's up with all the white people at the zoo? I probably would have toned down the whole Grapes of Wrath bit. Or maybe I would have gone off on some pompous screed about how Juniper feels Henry Fonda's performance in that film transcends John Ford's flawed vision of Steinbeck's masterpiece. Then I'd try counteract this bragging about her precociousness by flagellating myself for being a flawed parent. Voila!

This blogging thing sure is easier than it looks.

So next week if I write a post contrasting my parents' arranged marriage in Mumbai with how unfair it is that they disapprove of me dating the chisel-jawed Anglo coxswain of the Brown crew team, trust that I'm probably making most of it up. But at least it will be more interesting than what I'm actually going through.

*just kidding, Ruth!