Bang bang, my baby

In which our here is forcibly reminded that pitter-patter gives way to determined stalk

My pseudo-child forcefully removed herself from childhood in my mind as she yelled at the on-screen couple who, having been reunited through a hard-won gap in the zombie onslaught, were stopping for a slow romantic kiss rather than running for more defensible positions.

“Why don’t you just bang him right now!” my dear sweet Moonbeam cried and continued hurling imprecations at the screen as I turned to stare over the sound of my jaw bouncing off into the distance. She didn’t notice my wide-eyed look, engaged as she was by the admittedly idiotic victory reunion despite the fact that they were at the center of a giant zombie bullseye.

I, for my part, was thinking about the fact that this was the same girl who used to excuse herself from movies that I’d already approved for her, simply because “It says PG and I’m not old enough.” I asked her about it and her response was “Oh please, you’re just getting the unfiltered version of me.” Which is a compliment in that she chooses to be unrestrained but… of all my pseudo-children, she was the baby, and her growing up still occasions a sense of loss.

In the course of my film-digitization project, I turned up a canister that dates back to around 2000. And one picture of the kids all together in a single shot. It’s rarer than you think, distance and family politics conspired to keep gatherings smaller, and even when we were together, we didn’t often get just them together.

It was breathtaking, just to see them, so small. I wonder why I never feel the same awe at pictures from my childhood.

(Then again, the larger scale project is going to be a painful process for someone detail fixated like me. It’s hard to give up meta data. Going to be expensive not to, though. Oh well. It’s only money.)

Moonbeam is mad at me for not rallying longer in our email exchanges. This is another one of those standards that other people seem to have that I’ve never really been taught, I think. My view has always been that in conversational emails, you can’t answer every single question or the email thread becomes an all consuming mishmash of things that are hard to track and follow. So you answer the things that stand out and if you missed one or another that’s important, well, it’ll come up again because it’s important.

She, however seems to be unimpressed which means that I’m clearly going to have to take a different approach with her. Don’t know how it’s going to work, I’m not feeling hugely emaily.

Oh well. The kid’s clarified what she wants, and I can do that.