"For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, 'Cosby Show' sweaters, suburban dad sweaters."

"I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate. The most memorable of these was bright red, with a gold crest on its breast, like the sigil of the kind of hoity-toity prep school I did not attend, and drooped so hugely on me I looked like a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. My girlfriend charitably suggested that I 'loomed large' in my mother’s mind.... My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies. When Mom gave me a gray-and-white snowflake-pattern sweater one Christmas, I took it across the country with me to Seattle, where I staged photographs of myself wearing it with friends.... Later that afternoon, we returned the sweater to Macy’s.... A few years ago, I finally wore a sweater that Mom gave me 10 years earlier to visit her in the memory care unit at her retirement home. Although she no longer remembered the sweater, she did go out of her way to admire it, and I got to tell her that it was from her...."

From "The Unbearable Sadness of Your Parents’ Bad Holiday Gifts" by Tim Kreider (NYT).

1. "All mothers live in palaces built of lies" — Ironically, that's a lie that the son is telling himself. The mother in his mind lives in a palace made of lies he's telling himself about what must be in her mind. 

2. He doesn't even have his lie-palace built straight. He won't commit to whether his mother wanted him to look unlovable ("sexless") or lovable ("hoping... to attract a mate") or go too deeply into whether he's thinking of the interior of his mother's mind or his own. 

3. Maybe his mother was playfully participating in the Ugly Christmas Sweater meme and waiting for him to overcome his politeness and call her out. He's a humorist. Did he not get some/any of his humor from her? 

4. Do sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers? I won't say all sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers, but the ones who begin sentences with "All mothers..." certainly do — unless they're just kidding.

5. I learned a new word: "sigil."

Eerie early-morning happenings.

I got up just before 3 a.m. and, brushing my teeth, I dipped back into my new audiobook, "Our Country Friends: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart.

He messed up the bed’s careful sheets as if two lovers had just enjoyed a tussle on it. He spotted two carved wooden statues of pineapples on the modernist desk... and knocked over one of them, adding some asymmetry to the deathly hospital order around him. What would his mother say from her immovable Gangnam cocoon, her throat tingling with hot barley tea? Advice she would never follow herself. Be strong for your friends. 

A woman—Masha, it would have to be—was screaming...

Her what cocoon? Cheongsam? That's a tight-fitting dress, perhaps cocoon-like, but it's a Chinese dress, and the character was born in Korea.

Settling in at my desktop, I open up the Kindle version of the book and do a word search on "screaming" to find the page and see "Gangnam cocoon." It's a place name — the mother's not trapped within her clothing, but her district of Seoul. The word is familiar to me because of that song, "Gangnam Style."

Idly, I scan book titles in my Kindle app and notice "Pain: When Will It End?" What's that? Something I added to the Kindle at Meade's request? I open it up. Oh! It's a fantastic book of cartoons. I don't recognize the artist's name — Tim Kreider — but I must have put this in the Kindle. (Yeah, I see now, that I blogged about the purchase back in 2019.)

I become completely absorbed in the brilliance of "Pain: When Will It End?" and I arrive at this cartoon:

We're so self-absorbed. I get it. But I wondered, what would happen on earth if the moon were to disappear? I click out of Kindle and over to Safari and google:

5 suggested completions and 4 of them are about the loss of the moon?! How can that happen? I was in Kindle, and I hadn't typed "moon." I hadn't even encountered "moon" in searchable text, only seen it handwritten in a drawing. 

But maybe the disappearance of the moon is the number one thing people are wondering about when they muse about what might happen on earth. Perhaps there's some movie or TV show where the moon is suddenly gone for some reason and all sorts of disasters ensued. 

But what disasters? Something about the tides? The oceans go wild? Is there some weird psychic damage that would occur if we could no longer gaze upon that big white circle in the sky?

"I learned many things from Mad: who Spiro Agnew was, the plots of R-rated movies like 'Coma' and show tunes like 'I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin''..."

"... which the writers of Mad evidently assumed would be familiar enough to 10-year-olds of the ’70s to parody — 'I Got Plenty of Muslims,' sung by a black militant. I also learned about black militants. I also learned from Mad that politicians were corrupt and deceitful, that Hollywood and Madison Avenue pushed insulting junk, that religion was more invested in respectability than compassion, that school was mostly about teaching you to obey arbitrary rules and submit to dingbats and martinets — that it was, in short, all BS. Grown-ups who worried that Mad was a subversive influence, undermining the youth of America’s respect for their elders and faith in our hallowed institutions, were 100 percent correct."

From "The World According to Mad Magazine/Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct" by Tim Kreider (NYT)(Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist).

ADDED: Here's an example of a cartoon by Kreider: "Male Anorexia." If you like that, consider buying "The Pain: When Will It End?" I did. The back cover has a high-level blurb — from David Foster Wallace:

“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”

AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):