I'm going to a wedding. I will be back in a week.

Henry and I like to play Sorry! together. Henry doesn’t know how much I like to play it, because I never offer to play it. But I always hope he will ask if we can.

We fought over Sorry! this morning. He was losing and so he said he wanted me to win and was trying to move his pieces so that I would win. I said this was not an acceptable way to play a game. I said we wouldn’t play the game if he played this way. He continued to play this way. I said the game was over and removed our pieces. He cried and said I was mean and retreated to the play room, where a very meaningful pillow was thrown at me as I entered. By this point I had realized that I should have just walked away from the game, instead of dismantling it. It had been childish of me to dismantle it. I didn't say that to Henry, but I apologized for ending the game. He said that I was mean to apologize for something I had done wrong.

Eventually we played two more games. He won the first and I won the second.

For years at bedtime Henry wanted us to tell him stories. There were rules, his rules: The stories had to be true, and they couldn’t be repeated. Now John has started making this request, but I think he’s too young for the stories we used to tell his brother. Last night he asked for a story about Papa, and I told him that once Papa was angry with his mother, and decided to punish her by running away. (Henry loved this story.) Young Papa went to tell his mother he was going to run away, because he thought she’d be very sorry for what she had done, but instead she said, If you’re going to run away, you’ll need a thermos and a sweater. Papa thought to himself: This is bad. Then his mother took him to the front door and said goodbye. He wandered a little while on his street, maybe sat under a bush somewhere, then came home and rang the bell. He was readmitted.

Johnny’s eyes were huge in the dark. I found myself tacking a hasty, bad lesson onto the thing: It’s better to stay with your mommy in the house. John was relieved. Yes, it’s better to stay with Mommy. Then he wanted another story.

Today we had a mystery. “Carey, I have bad news,” said the exterminator. He is a wonderful man and an excellent exterminator, and I have been fascinated for some time by his vivid turn of phrase and ability to build suspense through foreshadowing and other devices. In fact, I sometimes think of making him the hero of a knock-off Murakami story. Or if not the hero, then someone the hero is really, really glad to see.

On this visit we had already discussed the bats that live in the tippy-top of our house, how the flies I was seeing in my office could be there because of something rotting in the walls, and how you would think mice would be outside during the summer but all he is seeing is mice in houses. These weren’t pieces of bad news, they were just regular news, if you’re our exterminator. The first time he had given me bad news I had had to go down to the basement and stand with my head bent (we have a very shallow cellar) next to a pile of rat droppings while he talked to me about the rats in my house.

He had my attention. But then it turned out that the bad news was that someone or something had stolen our outdoor rat bait station, which had been driven into the ground with a stake and further held there by heavy stones. He said raccoons could do this, which was something else I didn't want to hear about. He was doubtful, though. I said we had an opossum around us somewhere. He didn’t think an opossum was up to it. Which leaves us with humans. So I’m wondering, which one of you stole my rat bait station? I want it back.

If you read Smitten Kitchen, you’ll know that she is always making cakes and bringing them to other people’s birthdays and weddings. That’s so sweet of her. I wonder if they’re any good. Oh, I’m sure they’re good, I’m sure they’re delicious, but what if they weren’t? What if they were these very good looking things that tasted horrible? Or just tasted okay? What if there was just something about them you didn’t like but you never could say anything about it so you always said, Wow, Smitten, delicious! This is so good, making a show of enjoying it before sliding the remainder into the garbage, and then one moonlit night your beloved while drunk said, Are you happy now?, and you were engaged and you knew that when you told her she was going to insist on baking the wedding cake? Instead of getting something off your registry? What would you do then? Would you elope? Would you develop a very serious allergy to cake? What would you do?

I actually know the answer to this question: You would blame it on your fiancé’s mother.

I am starting to suspect that Richard Serra has a sense of humor. Could this be? Will someone else go look at "Union of the Torus and the Sphere", 2001, and tell me if I’m wrong? If I’m imagining things? It’s at Dia: Beacon, wedged into a room not much larger than it is, and it leans, it swoons to the side. I thought it looked ridiculous, crammed in that space, and then when I walked around I thought it was actually, kind of magnificently, funny. Because it was elegant but dangerous but not dangerous and heavy and all Serra-like, serious, but then you had to squeeze by and it was like when you’re at a party and there’s someone hugely drunk talking to other people with her back to you, blocking the way to the toilet, and you can’t get her attention so you try to sneak behind her but then she steps backward and falls on you and throws her drink on you and pins you to the wall and gets your toe. And says sorry.

Which reminds me that the other day I was racing through the supermarket under deadline, deadline being making it home with the groceries in time to get the groceries from the car to the house to the fridge and also hand off the children to my parents with sufficient time to gas up the car and make it to our seats at the Mets game for the opening pitch. I was under pressure, but when am I not, when do I wander through the supermarket aisles thinking What will I do with myself today, all I have is time? Anyway, I was rounding the corner from the beer aisle into the dairy aisle with a full shopping cart and I went a little bit, a tiny bit wide into the dairy aisle, thanks to the weight of the cart and the speed I was going at, and screeched to a halt quite close to a stooped elderly woman who was not under pressure, and doesn’t understand the way people drive through town these days etc. “I took that a little wide,” I said, smiling apologetically. She corrected me: “A little fast.” And I said, as I walked down the aisle, “Thanks. Bitch.”

Now I’m entranced by the idea of Richard Serra, who never, ever smiles for pictures—please see the MoMA bio picture of him—having a sense of humor. Not a wry sense of humor but an actual sense of humor, so when I get home from a hard day playing tennis and running errands and tell Richard Serra, who is out back at the grill, that if they made a documentary of my morning it would be called An Inconvenient Poop, he puts down the tongs and laughs.

Luckily for everyone, my life, which was diminishing to a point, the point being watching my children and doing laundry and washing the dishes and just eating whatever I could cram into my mouth when dinner came around, has expanded again. I read a book, I went to a Mets game, I watched Blood Diamond and part of an Abbott and Costello and a little bit of the Schama thing on Vincent van Gogh.

I have a question, which is the question I always have, which is What should art be about? My original position on this, which you can think of in many ways, and which I sometimes think of as the Fuck Saul Bellow position, is that art should be about babies. Trying not to have babies, having babies, raising babies. Fuck Saul Bellow because Saul Bellow, great artist that he was, loved to locate the authentic in black dudes on the street and a general concept of toughness and coolness that is in itself completely bogus, but then even more so if you think about him standing on the street outside a house in which there is a wife raising his children.

You could also call it the Elizabeth Murray position. You know, that life is movement and art’s job is to capture movement and by the way, when I said life is movement I meant heartbeats, contractions, walking up stairs. Creation.

Of course I think art is many things but it seems to me that often what it is not is about babies, when really what is more important than how people have and raise their children?

So then I spent a week with my children, really with my children, no babysitting, or not much, the three of us together from the time we got up in the morning until the time they went to bed and my mind narrowed and narrowed and I thought Oh crap, I was wrong. Art can’t possibly be about this.

Today was the last day of Henry’s school year. He was so tired. He was a company man, home at 6. He just wanted to put his feet up and have the dog bring him his slippers. Mommy, a chocolate milk.

I gave him his chocolate milk and got him in the car. We had a date at Dia: Beacon (the colon: more offensive than misused quotation marks?) to meet his cousins, in from out of town. Please don’t start me on the terrible directions the museum gives out. Are the directions art? Is sending someone up Route 9 for forty miles a work of art? Because if it is, you’re a fucking mother fucker. I didn’t take the bait. I took 87 way the fuck out of my way while the kids fought in the back seat and the aquarium played its unrelenting medley of grief. There was a moment where the children told me the batteries had run out but this was heart-breakingly inaccurate.

You can go to the museum’s directions if you want and you’ll see I had a choice of directions, the sane ones or the insane ones, and they listed the insane directions first and I didn’t see the other ones so I am complicit in the bad directions. I’m still pissed.

Anyway, we arrived. Eventually. This is almost always true. The children greeted their cousins and the four of them ran around inside the enormous old factory, totally ruining the Zen vibe for everyone else. One man’s minimalist restored factory is another’s playground for running and making noise. Ironic, isn’t it? Well, at least they didn’t break anything. Or kill themselves on Robert Smithson’s “Map of Broken Glass.”

I’m going to have to continue this on Monday. I will say before I go that it’s not that you can’t look at art with children around. You can look at art as children do, so with no understanding of history but with a robust appreciation of things that look weird or scary.

We went home and watched Scooby Doo. I’ll talk about the art later.

We’re going to go to the pool today. I’m going to sit on the edge of the kiddy pool in my bathing suit and my eyes are going to tear from suntan lotion running into them and John and another boy or girl, to be selected from any number of boys and girls at the pool, are going to fight over his excavator, which John brings to the pool and leaves on the side of the pool, but which is not to be touched. An excavator is an extremely potent lure, it will call four-year-olds to it from the deep end, it will pull a stumbling one-year-old through the water holding her mother’s hand. But it is not to be touched!

At the pool everyone is more or less naked, and the veneer of civilization seems very thin. In fact the hold civilization has on us is nowhere better demonstrated than at the pool, where enjoyment is tempered and bent to the ever-present rules.

We have bought Cool Alert Pull-Ups, which I misrepresented to my husband as Icy Cold Pull-Ups. The actual model makes a cool feeling when wet, but in my imaginary version they freeze the little private parts when pee hits them. That’ll teach them. Once you go down that route, of course, there are a whole series of Pull-Ups that you could invent: The Exploding Paint Pack Pull-Ups; the Small Electric Shock Pull-Ups (too obvious?); the Smoking Pull-Ups, etc. Anything shameful or painful will do. I am interested in potty training as a construct, of course, not as a series of wet and stinky diapers, a regimen of ass-wiping, a cavalcade of candy bribes. I’m not interested in potty-training as we know it. I want to see beyond that.

The Ocean Wonders Aquarium has resurfaced. Johnny carries it around with him like a boom box, playing the music. Or I have to carry it, since it takes thirteen batteries and weighs a ton. It’s supposed to hang on the side of a crib.

There are three or four different songs. They are all formless and basically unsingable, but haunting. In the car the aquarium rides between the boys, set on continuous play, with the volume up. Johnny likes its mournful tone. On the way to ice cream tonight, he said to me, “This song is sad.” I said, “But you’re not sad,” and he said, “But the song is sad.”

And strangely enough, today I was sad. A friend of ours is ill, in the hospital, awaiting surgery, and last night I dreamed that I was with my Nana again. I was in her house, which after her death was sold to a developer who pretended he wasn’t a developer who was going to tear it down, who then tore it down and replaced it with two houses. No one in my family will drive by them, although they are more than willing for you to drive by them. They want you to drive by them, to tell them how bad it is. In the dream I was in her house and we were all going to her unveiling. I guess she was there and not there. I went to the bathroom and gave birth.

Yar yar yar life and death. And ice cream. And hide and seek. Real estate and parking lots and swimming pools and baseball camp. Hospitals. Apple sauce. That fucking aquarium. A few years ago, when a friend of mine had a son who was also under its spell, we used to call each other and try to sing the songs.

I’m trying to get over losing in the semi-finals three weeks ago. I thought I had. I thought I didn’t care. But now I realize that I do care, and that it’s bothering me. Yes, Joyce, my opponent, was a very good player. She was undefeated for the season. Whenever anyone heard (and everyone seems to have heard) that I lost to Joyce, they all said, “Oh, she’s a very good player.” Someone said that to me at the supermarket.

There were other external conditions that contributed to my defeat, like that fact that she was left-handed and was able to neutralize my inside-out forehand that fades to the ad side. And it was incredibly humid and I put suntan lotion on someone else's back and thereafter couldn’t keep my racquet in my grip. I didn’t play very horribly. I had my serve. Still, I’m pissed I didn’t step it up and win. For the first four games I was in a fog. And for the last four games, also. The courts were in the middle of fields of dandelions and their fuzz blew across us with a kind of Feminine Product effect and I drifted off as well. Now I’m pissed about it. I’m so pissed I think about doing things like taking lessons and training. Running, and eating right. Ha ha ha ha ha.

2-6, 2-6. It’s depressing.

Anyway, did I report back on the team party? It was very nice. I received pink socks as a parting gift from my captains. Thank you. I wrote notes on pictures of the captains that were then framed. My notes were banal, unfortunately. Or fortunately. Because if they’re not banal, they’re inappropriate. The person who was going to bring sangria was told not to, because they made peach punch instead. I had a glass of it. I was careful to eat snackies, so I wouldn’t get drunk and start free-associating or overeating.

Or anything. Lately I've been wondering how I would know that I was no longer free. Because, with an eye to the neighbors, I control my own behavior so effectively.

Maybe I'm overstating things.

Today I went to Henry’s year-end poetry fest. Henry read a poem he wrote about Jose Reyes of the Mets that brought actual tears to my eyes. He was wearing a Jose Reyes shirt. It was a tremendous performance. As a rule, I don’t like to say disparaging things about the other kindergartners, but since you asked, yes, his poem was the best. Mom is great, mom is this, I like baseball, etc. Some poems about summer. Please. Children. Make it interesting. Engage me. It’s cold out there, if you know what I mean.

We are going to start renovating our house, of course. I say of course because almost everything we do is overdetermined, from where we live to what we drive to where we vacation to when we’re going to have the third one. Oh, you have to have a third one, if you’re going to have a fourth. Anyway, the kitchen needs updating, darlings. Our appliances are ancient, and there’s forty years of shit between the floorboards. I found a kitchen I liked in New York magazine and so we’re off. Who cares if we don’t have the money? No one ever has the money for this kind of thing. Except in our neighborhood, where some people do. I’d gloss over this fact, except that it seems somehow important.

I’m surprised by how much I care about appliances. I could talk to you quite movingly about the appliances I used to have, when we lived in the city. The apartment had just been renovated and they were state of the art. Now the children don’t remember the ice maker. They don’t know the “ice maker” exists. We’ve developed a highly ritualized procedure for the Getting of the Ice and the Cracking of the Ice. Before it can happen, everyone’s hands have to be washed. But recently I told them that some day we will have an ice maker, and all this will be over. We’ll remember these times fondly. When we were young.

I know you’re all excited, wondering, What is going to happen at the tennis luncheon today? Will Carey’s salade niçoise be the success that it should be? How much sangria will everyone drink? I want to know the answers to these questions, myself. And I will, soon.

Meanwhile, I thought I would tell you the menu for the luncheon as if it were one word:

CruditewithhummusBacon-wrappedfigsVegetablespringrolls-SpicytunarollsSpanikopitaandtiropitesSpinachpistachio-andstrawberrysaladSaladeNicoiseFruitsaladPoachedsalmon-MarinatedsteakChickenandvegetableshiskabobsGrilled-shrimpwithpineapplesalsaRoastedcornsouffleBuffalomozza-rellaandtomatoeswithfreshbasilCouscousLemonLulucakeCoff-eeblondebrowniesChocolatemousseAssortedrugelachorminitarts

I wonder if there is a tune I can set this to. I always want to set everything to “If I Were a Rich Man.” Although this morning a mother at Johnny’s school told me she was working at “Safety Town” this week and I immediately thought, “Let me take you to [beat beat] Safety Town!” It’s a place where children learn not to kill themselves with electricity or drown or be run over or abducted. It’s run by the Junior League.

Where was I? Borges. I’m reading a collection of short stories by Borges called Doctor Brodie’s Report. If Borges stories were jokes they would all have the same punch line: Then he was killed by a knife. That’s life as an Argentine gaucho for you. So what’s the punch line around here supposed to be? Then she protected herself and her children from accidents for the rest of their lives and they were killed in old age by disease.

I took the boys to the dentist yesterday. Not the sedation dentist, the pediatric dentist. I can’t quite put my finger on what I find so strange about the pediatric dentist, although if I had to say one thing I would say, “Bubble-gum flavored latex gloves.” The kids love it at the dentist’s: the dentist gives out sunglasses the kids wear so the light doesn’t hurt their eyes, they lie back in their chairs, they open their mouths, and they get prizes at the end. Everyone who works there smiles non-stop.

They do a fabulous job of it, at the pediatric dentist. It isn’t frightening in the least. The dentist does lie to the children about things like whether the fish on the computer screens are really fish (he says they are very thin fish and there’s only a little water in there) and whether he can push a button on his console and have pizza delivered (Henry believes he can), but the children don’t care, they love it, and I spend my time there smiling and faking it along with everyone else—the dentist is so fun, darlings—for my own reasons, i.e., so we can all get through the dental visit and move on with our day.

The little lies are indicative of a big lie, but the children don’t know that, yet, and I’m going to try not to mention it to them.

My own dental visits involve very polite but still high-stakes battles over whether I can watch TV while I’m having my teeth cleaned; (relatedly) my being hated by the hygienist, who has an enormous bosom; and finally me sitting there thinking to myself, I’m a grown-up, I can just stand up and walk out of here if I want to, no one can stop me.

Now I’m thinking about which flavor latex gloves I would like. Bread? Pickled ginger? What if they had latex gloves left over from the nineties, and they were all Sun-Dried Tomato and Pesto? Wouldn’t that be so sad?

I’m writing a story about a woman who becomes a graffiti artist in the suburbs, and now I spend my time thinking about what I would do as a graffiti artist. Inspired by Banksy's rats, I might make a lot of squirrel art. Dress the squirrels up and have them deliver critiques. There are a lot of squirrels around here, including a family of black squirrels whose base of operations is quite close to our house. Once I was walking my exercise loop and became worried that a black squirrel was following me, but then I realized there were just a lot of black squirrels. So then I worried that they had organized surveillance.

On Friday I went to the Museum of Modern Art to be ravished by the Richard Serra retrospective. I love the free Fridays at MoMA, when the place is packed with groups of students who have given over maybe their lives, and certainly their personal appearances, to Art. A staid matron in from the suburbs, I wander alone.

This Friday was better than many, also, in that it was cool and sunny out, and that I hadn’t been let out of my house in some time and so was happy to be free. David was supposed to meet me there and was late and I didn’t care, because I was by myself, looking at art, surrounded by strangers. If you ask me what I miss most about living in the city, I will tell you it is the strangers. When people are strangers they are perfect. When I am surrounded by strangers I am filled with love. As opposed to when I am at the playground.

I wonder if Richard Serra feels the same? Or does he hate everyone? Oh, it’s not all about whether an artist hates or likes people, I know that. But Serra kind of hates people, I think. Or we’re not important to him. That’s probably more accurate. I went into the Sculpture Garden to see his works, and it was like a party there. People were snapping pictures of themselves and of their friends, children were hanging out on the little bridges, a crowd of snackers (soon to include me) occupied the chairs in the snacking area and watched the parade. There was a creepy dude wandering “Intersection II” smiling and telling people they were taking beautiful pictures of the rust. When you entered “Torqued Ellipse IV”, it was like you entered a room in someone’s apartment. Everyone was lit up and facing you. Hey! You wanted to say to the people already there. How is everyone?

None of this had anything to do with the art. Well, the art was made of shapes that allowed people to wander through it and gather in it, but the art wasn’t there for that. The art didn’t like that. It didn’t like parties. It didn’t care about people’s bodies. It wasn’t there to create community, for God’s sake. The art was about something else. What else? It was hard to say, standing there in the late spring sunshine, staring at the leaning slabs of steel that were, according to the signs, not to be touched. Something about eternal shit that is going to fuck with you? And shapes?

On the one hand, I think that art that can’t stand up to a little joie de vivre is pretty shitty art. And yet, I do love the idea that art might have nothing to do with human concerns. It might not reference human form, it might not engage topics of human interest, it might not even be able to be seen by humans, until the Great Salt Lake dries up. Why not? Who says art has to be appreciated by people? It could be a message sent out to no one. Right?

The second phone line was broken. I waited around the house all yesterday for someone to come and fix it, but no one did. The day ended in a frenzy of recriminations and being put on hold. This morning a repairman came and told me that the alarm system had taken over my second line, and I asked him if he could route around it, and he said he could, if I didn’t mind disabling the alarm system. So we disabled the system.

At first I was happy that my problem was solved and that it didn’t involve someone telling me that mice or rats had chewed through the lines, because we have mice and rats in the house and they make me crazed and ashamed. Sometimes the mice and rats die in the walls and smell and once I am sure that the dead thing is in the wall and nowhere I am going accidentally to find it I am pleased by the smell of something rotting, because I know that at least one of them is dead. I found out recently that the previous owners had five cats and I feel ashamed, as well, that we can’t have cats, because we are allergic to them. I thought briefly about the new crazy hypoallergenic cat, but you don’t know you’ll get a good mouser, and they cost $6,000. And there’s a waiting list. And ideally I would want more than one. I also thought about a terrier, because some terriers are good at killing rats. Right now we’re using a lot of poison, but I feel like these other methods would be better. I don’t know why I think that.

Anyway, then I realized that we don’t have an alarm system anymore and someone I don’t know, the technician, knows that we don’t have an alarm system anymore, and I became worried for our property, and for our future sense of security at home.

My tennis team, which calls itself The Pinks, is having a party next week, to which you are not invited. Everyone has to offer to bring something, or their contribution will be assigned to them. So far people have offered to bring:

Fruit Salad
Roasted Corn Soufflé
Spinach, Pistachio and Strawberry Salad
Salade Niçoise
Sangria

I am the salade Niçoise. I will let you know as more dishes are added. I think the series of events that made up the season, beginning with try-outs, including matches and emails, and concluding with us assembling this food, bringing it to our captain's house, eating it, and taking the leftovers home, is a work of art of some sort. I am not making little of this or joking about this. And I am not this kind of an artist.

I’ve been trying to imagine how a writer could make her work performative in the same way that a visual artist can and often does. I mean, why is no one interested in writers performing? And why aren’t writers interested in being somewhere and writing at some particular point and seeing what comes from that? For four nights I undertook a performative exercise in which I went upstairs to my office at 10 p.m. and wrote one hundred words in ten minutes, but after four nights this made me really tired, and it conflicted with the surprisingly long list of things I also often need to do at 10 p.m. (eat dinner out, sleep, have sex, stretch and strengthen muscles so I can play tennis without injuring my back). This was supposed to be the point of the whole thing, of course, that I would write then instead of doing those things, but those things won out. I am a shitty artist. Still, I wonder why better, crazier people than I am haven’t managed to do anything interesting with the idea of writing as performing. I’m not talking about one-off contests and stunts, I’m talking about some kind of rigorous attempt to make writing as much about the writer, about the physical self of the writer, even, as painting, drawing, film, and performance art have been.

I kind of like the story I started. It was about a couple with an infant son, in Brussels. Each night at 10 p.m., because the baby wouldn’t sleep, they walked to get ice cream. In Brussels in the summer, if it isn’t raining, it’s still light at 10 p.m., and not only light, but bright. People are out walking and eating dinner and skate-boarding, illuminated. The couple liked to choose different ways to walk to ice cream, and back. One way was the way that went by the cat that would follow them.

Then something happened, but then I stopped writing.

The point of all of this is that of course the blog is performative.

Today I heard my favorite of all advertisements on the radio as I drove away from a friendly tennis match. Sedation Dentistry promises that you won’t remember a thing about your visit to the dentist, but I think they don’t go far enough. I think they should sell a package which is bought for you by a loved one and involves you being sedated in the morning before you wake up, brought to the dentists’ office, messed with, and brought back home, where you come to without even knowing (for sure) that you’ve been to the dentists’ office. The big drawback, as I see it, is that you will then brag to everyone that your teeth are perfect without ever seeing a dentist until the loved one that bought you the Special Sedation package goes crazy and tells you the truth, ruining the whole thing. Alternately, you could worry all the time about not going to the dentist even though you have been going. Still, they should offer the package. I think there's a market for it, and even if there isn't a market for it, I want it on the market.