InsaneJournal

My daughter tells me there's nothing reprehensible about wearing long sleeves in Los Angeles, in May. In July, she concedes, it would be an evil thing to do. Vile. Wretched. But this tiny she is quick to remind me that it isn't even mid-May yet, and the air in this hotel is...brisk.

Despite her supposed "rationality," this vacation is only jacking up the points on the My Daughter Is Nuts metre. We've been in LA (granted, it's a half-hour plane trip from Frisco, if that. These are not exactly grueling conditions putting us under duress, here, but it is LA. I'm not a fan of LA. LA and I, you could say, have had our tiffs. The ex-wife lives somewhere around here, but that's surprisingly immaterial to the problem. The people in LA nauseate me more than the people anywhere else. It's a terrible spot for a vacation, especially with children. Disgressing.) for a week. You would think, her dad being in the movie business, Eva would have seen more than her fair share of Hollywood. She hasn't. I try to keep her out of that stuff, but this year, she said she wanted to see it. She came to me, maybe a month ago, with a notebook. And she said to me, "Dad, the premiere's in a month."

"What premiere?" said I. If Sam didn't hack my account and print out all my pertinent emails and paste them (yes, it was paste, once) to the fridge, I would never know what's going on in my life. It's fair to say I didn't know what premiere she was talking about. Fair, but not true, in this case.

"Phoenix," she replied, tersely. "And I want to go to Hollywood."

Ah, but gentle reader, it was not just Hollywood that Princess Eva wanted to see. She had a marked map of every sidewalk star that was relevant to her interests. She had a sightseeing guide. She had a handwritten sheet of admission prices and important events at both Disneyland and Universal Studios. She had an ironic itinerary. Ironic, because it was pretty good, as these things go, but she spelled "itinerary" wrong, and a few other things besides. I guess we can't be complete geniuses, at seven.

She also isn't quite old enough to understand when I try to explain to her that there are no more wretched hives of scum and villainy on the planet than Los Angeles and Hollywood. (And Disneyland.) Attempting to explain to her ends in labeling me "silly." Her next response? "There's no such thing as soulless people. That doesn't work."

I wish, darling, that it didn't work. It works fine, baby girl. You do a lot of smiling and nodding, with children. If they don't believe you when you tell them the stove is hot, they touch it, they get burned, and they're done with it. If they don't believe you when you tell them there are people without souls, nothing is ever going to make them understand that, until they're old enough to know what souls are. By then, they've already loved someone who's empty inside, and when they do, are they wondering why you didn't warn them?

When you try to protect a kid from something, you protect them from doing it, but you try to stop them seeing it, too. I keep Eva out of the way for that reason. I remember stuff from when I was kid, cryptic stuff, that I spent the next twenty years trying to figure out. Empty people were one of those things. I don't want her to wonder about them. Of all the parents I know, I'm the most violent with the TV parental controls. That box doesn't show any channels that play celebrity news. It doesn't pump the reality shows into our house. Is that sheltering? No, it's smart. Kids have a funny way of thinking. If someone's on TV, they gotta be important. That's what kidspeak dictates, and you look up to important people, don't you?

I'll let you put two and two together. The point is. The point is that I don't fancy the idea of dragging Eva around Hollywood, but what I really don't fancy is shooting her down when it's not imperative. So we took her to see a couple of her stars, and we showed her the Chinese Theater. Sam stopped at the same Starbucks three times. I glowered at everyone we don't know.

And then, ah, Happy Fate. I hit a stroke of Luck. Eva was bored. Not an hour after we found parking (which took almost an hour in itself), the Lady announced that she was bored, and I all too happily offered to find her something else to do. We hopped back in the car, and got blissfully lost in the suburbs for just long enough to make my passengers think I really didn't know where I was going, and then we drove back to the hotel, where I let Eva call out to order dinner. Crisis averted. Adventure had.

It goes to show, you can't make plans with kids, even when they're the ones making the plans. It never works. Someone throws up on the Tilt-O-Whirl, someone gets a bee sting, someone has a tantrum because someone can't have more ice cream, someone gets bored. If you're ever afraid it'll kill you to do something your kid wants to do - do it anyway. Something will happen, halfway through, that makes your day.

It was about the same, when we went down to Disneyland. We were fine, until the middle of the afternoon. Eva fell victim to a series of catastrophes. Catastrophe the First: dropping a churro on the ground, and refusing to let me buy her a second one. Catastrophe the Second: another girl is wearing the Cinderella dress she wants. There can't be two Cinderellas (her words), and thus she refuses to let us buy her a costume. Catastrophe the Third: after exiting that water thing over at California Adventure (sopping wet and minus Sam, who declined to participate in the dampness), it was made known to me that her Tamagotchi had gone missing.

The rest of the day went the way of the digital pet, which is not dissimilar to the way of the dodo. Dead. It was an ex-day at Disneyland. The day had ceased to be. We had to hustle out of there, before the waterworks got too bad, and pacify her with promises that she could be the one to call room service again.

That afforementioned premiere is tonight, and La Daughter appears no more sane than usual. She's telling Sam, now, that he should let her take the silk flowers out of the bathroom, and put them in her hair. No one will notice, she says, and she'll bring them back after the film. I do have my reservations about taking her at all. We've read the books to her, but I deliberately kept her off the set, on the days we filmed the Ministry of Magic scenes. How does that affect a child? It's not a gory death, but the scene's emotional. I don't want to be sorry, in a couple hours, that I told her she could come.

But a promise is a promise, and I haven't let her miss an HP movie yet. Here's to keeping my fingers crossed for another one of those child fate interventions.