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Potty training a human being is a slippery tight-rope covered in wee, over a big pit of excrement. Make it too strict and obsessive and your child grows up to be a clean-freak serial killer, celebrate each correctly captured wee too enthusiastically and your child grows up to be an exhibitionist serial-killer. What you want is a child that grows up to be a laid-back serial killer who does not have any issue about their own bodily waste.
I wonder which way my parents went. I do feel like celebrating after a particularly good poo (though rarely feel any emotion about wees) but that might just be down to something inert within me. Or without me, by that stage.
It’s hard not to celebrate a successfully toileted or potted plop or piss though. Because it saves on nappies and it saves on the chance of shit being splattered everywhere and also it’s just such a huge personal achievement for someone who has spent a year or so just pissing in their pants when the fancy takes them. There must come a time where you have to deal down the cheers and the high fives, but won’t that lead to your kid just thinking they’re not doing it as well any more?
My own fixation with bodily functions has led to a highly successful career, but is there any guarantee that my child will remain as childish as me and be able to monetise her hang-ups?
“Have you done a poo?” I asked my daughter this evening as I detected a faint whiff of something (though as so often, given my age, I can never be sure the smell hasn’t inadvertently slipped from me). “No, no, no, no, no,” she said, but with a slightly weird look on her face. She had done a poo, it turned out. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed, or perhaps she was ashamed to have not informed me it was coming or maybe she doesn’t know what poo means. Most likely she just knows from our actions that wee and poo are the most important things in our lives and she didn’t want to have let us down.
What a confusing time it must be.
But none of this can be anywhere near as bad as finding out, in about 12 years time, that your dad was writing to strangers about you pooping in your pants. Sorry Phoebe. I am just glad that I am dead by now and so don’t have to face your ire. And I imagine you’ll also be pretty pissed off with me for dying. I have really dodged a bullet.
After watching Groundhog Day the Musical on Thursday our appetite was whetted to watch Groundhog Day the film tonight. I have seen this film so many times that it’s a bit like being in Groundhog Day, but there was loads of stuff that I’d forgotten. Although I remembered the first scene in the TV studio I had forgotten about them travelling down by van and discussing hotel arrangements. This happens so much with films I’ve seen a lot, that the first 10 mins are largely unfamiliar each time I see them. What’s that about? Oh I have the first signs of dementia. Thanks a lot.
Andi McDowell is much better than I remember her being and her character has more depth than I thought. I also like the fact that there’s more of a spark between her and Bill Murray before the day begins. Because otherwise it’s too big of a leap for them to have got together by the end of the one day they spend together, especially on that last day when he hardly spends time with her at all (hard to get always works though fellas). I am not convinced that him telling he loves her at the end of the last day is any creepier than when he does it to attempt to get into her pants 1000 years before (estimated), especially given he’s spent half an hour making an ice sculpture of her face though. There are a few things I take issue with in this almost perfect film though. I am not sure that after he’d mastered the piano he would have kept going for lessons. Would he have taken a lesson on this final day and if so would the piano teacher really take any credit for his performance at the end? She’d just have had a man turn up who was amazing at the piano and said, “I don’t think you need any lessons, but certainly if I see you performing tonight I will not feel comfortable taking any credit”. Very small point, but in a film that thinks through the angles so well, it seems like a minor slip.
I also wondered for the first time what happens to everyone else on February 3rd on all the realities. Do they all just cease to exist or does it create however many million alternate time-lines. So when Andi McDowell falls asleep on Bill Murray’s bed, does she just never wake up, or is there a February 3rd where she wakes up and Bill Murray has disappeared, or a February 3rd where a different version of Bill Murray has now escaped his curse. I WANT TO KNOW. WHY HAVEN’T YOU TOLD ME? It seems unfair that all those people have their alternate reality stamped out just because Murray can’t move on.
Also how many times did he have to practice at that perfect last day before he got it right? And actually that section of time where he is perfecting his route through town to save everyone must have been the dullest part of the whole thing. Or did he just know stuff so well by then that it was easy to do first time (no, because when he catches the boy he says he never says thank you - he’s done it loads).
Anyway, cracking film that bears repeated viewings and still holds up 23 years after it came out.
It did make me think about how much being in a play is like Groundhog Day anyway, so the people in theatrical version of this must feel that even more so. It must surely drive someone over the edge at some point.
