Don't confuse the title of this entry with the 1991 Amy Grant hit "Baby, Baby". Also, it has nothing to do with the 1985 film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. The reason for this title is that S and I had a baby yesterday. Well, she had it, I watched. And she didn't really "have" it because the OB performed a C-section (the baby was in breech position, making trouble already), and I didn't really watch because there was a sheet up, but you get the idea.
We're at the hospital now, tired and recovering -- S more so than me. But mother is healthy and happy, baby is healthy and happy. I'm healthy and happy. I'll write more later when I'm in an atmosphere more conducive to blogging.
Tired today. I didn't sleep well at all last night. I fell asleep almost immediately, but I woke up around 5 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep. I think it was largely from going to the Nationals game last night, or more precisely from drinking a few beers at the game -- just a few, not enough to get drunk, but enough to mess with my sleep, apparently. It also doesn't help to share a bed with a 8.5-month pregnant woman with restless leg syndrome. S got up around 8 or so and then I power slept until about 9:30, which I needed to avoid being a complete zombie today.
I was just talking with a friend about how when you sleep-in during the morning, you're much more likely to have crazy intense dreams (or at least more likely to remember them), and this happened this morning. Of course now I can't remember what my dreams were about, but I remember they were intense. It's probably good I can't remember, because if I could I'd probably write about it, and if you're like me there are few things you find more boring than the details of somebody else's dreams. To quote the great (underrated) band Built to Spill, "No one wants to hear, What you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them".
Anyway, the Nats game was pretty awesome. They're somehow the best team in baseball right now, and they're fun to watch. It was game 7 of a 9-game plan, I bought with some buddies. It's called the "Mike Morse Unleash the Beast Plan", and lo and behold, "The Beast" was unleashed -- Morse provided the heroics in a 6-4 victory by hitting an opposite field grand slam. Morse is actually a former Mariner who got busted in the minors for failing two PED tests (possible from the same dosage). He's a pretty good hitter now. I've taken to calling him Sleazeball Morse, because, well, see for yourself...
In other news, we've started watching Game of Thrones. We're an episode in to season 2. It's pretty good. I'd call it great, but I don't love some of the story lines. It's mostly about battling realms in a fictionalized medieval world, but then they have these other fantastical subplots about dragons and zombies, and these parts are too weird for me. I mean, it's one thing if you're going to write a fantasy story like The Lord of Rings, in which reality is completely suspended. But in Game of Thrones there is supposed to be some verisimilitude, I think. Most everybody is a normal human, but then a few people are magical or undead, so, I don't know, I just don't like the way they mix in the supernatural aspects.
But the characters are terrific, as is the acting. Peter Dinklage in particular is great as "The Imp" Tyrion Lannister. There's also this actor Aidan Gillen who's good who I finally figured out also played the mayor in The Wire (that one was bothering me for the longest time and I'd always think of it while driving and then forget to look it up), and who was in the first scene of the latest Batman movie. Speaking of the Batman movie, I also noticed that the guy who played Bane, Tom Hardy, is the star of the movie Warrior. I had no idea. He looks way buffer as Bane (not that he was small before) and it's not like you can recognize his face or voice as Bane.
In other, other news, you might recall me mentioning a few entries ago that I injured my hamstring about a month ago. It's getting a lot better. I'm still very limited in the exercises I can do -- pretty much just the boring elliptical machine and recumbent bike (no running, softball, racquetball, squats, etc.) -- but at least I can do everything I need to do in my normal life. I've been going to the gym after work a lot to rehab it. I think I need to write a book Simple Rules of Gym Etiquette. People just annoy me at the gym. Here would be some of my rules.
[This is what I'm talking about. The locker with the green lock isn't even this guy's locker. The green-lock guy came in and had to move this other dude's stuff to get into his locker. WTF?]
Don't leave your stuff all over the locker room while working out or showering. Believe it or not, other people don't like changing around your mess. If you do, don't get upset if it gets stolen or put in the trash can. (Not that I'd ever do these things, but I wish it upon people sometimes.)
Don't use a locker next to a locker that has a lock on it, if possible. Have a little forethought. There is nothing worse than trying to change in the same 2-foot by 2-foot area when the entire rest of the locker room is open.
If you want to listen to music, use headphones. This one is questionable, because there is a stereo in the gym. But I say that's a vestige of a pre-iPod era, when walkmen were cumbersome and annoying to work out with. Now, you can get an MP3 player as big as my thumbnail, there is no need to subject the entire gym to your shitty workout mix.
Don't act like you own the gym just because you can lift more than most people. There's this big fat, older dude who's at my gym sometimes. He's very strong and he'll do these super-sets where he rotates between a dozen stations, but he never cleans up a station in between rotations, so the station looks like it's in use, so other people are hesitant to start using it. It's like, c'mon dude, you can't "claim" 12 stations simultaneously. Have some courtesy. And also, instead of blasting your quads for a fifth time, why don't you hit the treadmill for 20 minutes, that's what you really need.
Don't monopolize the ab mats and yoga balls. If you want to do t'ai chi or yoga or something that requires you to use a mat or a ball for more than ten minutes, take a class or do it at home. There's a guy who comes in with his laptop and does like a 45-minute stretching / yoga / I-don't-know-what routine. He takes up the entire ab station. The fact that he's not even doing a real workout makes it that much more annoying
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I'll stop here, mostly because I have to do some stupid household chores (laundry, trash, etc.). I hate chores. I need an assistant to take care of this stuff for me. All I need is to have my salary quadrupled. I'm doing the bulk of the chores now too, because if S is on her feet too much they swell up like water balloons. Seriously, I've never seen anything like it. My sister's feet got pretty bad when she was pregnant, but I think S's are worse. They get so huge, but then if she lies down for a few hours they go way down. It's the weirdest thing.
"Retreads" isn't what I wanted this title to be. I wanted a different word -- remove the second 'e', flip the second 'r' and the 'a' -- but it's not a PC word, and if I put it up, I'm worried my legions of readers would abandon my site like it was a Chick-fil-A in Dupont Circle (DC joke). But sometimes this word is just too apt and it has to be used, if only implicitly.
[Since I mention car seats below, I wanted to put up a "Jackass" bit I remember involving car seats, but I couldn't find it, so instead you get this one, in which Preston asks an airport shuttle driver to help him with his bag.]
I experienced two such times this week, the first came in an email exchange I had with a woman who works at a DC police station. We want to get a "car seat safety inspection", where you bring your car seat into the police station before your child is born, and they sign off on it as safe and show you how to properly buckle your kid in. Now, I'm fairly confident that this is a completely superfluous task. I'm pretty sure these car seats aren't all that complicated, but we're doing it anyway, because you apparently just do superfluous tasks when you're having a kid if somebody uses the term "safety" or "well-being" when describing them. So I call the number given on the DC website, and I'm given the email address of the woman who handles this type of thing. I'll call her Ms. X.
We then have the email exchange given below. This is verbatim and complete. I'm cutting and pasting the entire emails from my inbox, only replacing her name with Ms. X, and using my first initial instead of my entire name. The emails are separated using dashed lines and I've put what we actually typed in italics.
Hi Ms. X,
My wife and I would like to schedule a car seat safety check, and I
understand you're the person to talk to about this. How do we proceed?
Thanks,
D
-------------------------------
wed-fri, some mondays 7am-1230pm, at 3320 Idaho Ave Nw
Check out the "One City Action
Plan"Read Mayor Gray's comprehensive strategy to create a thriving
city for all! Visit http://onecityactionplan.dc.
gov to learn more.
------------------------------- We'd like to do it in the morning the Friday of next week (Aug. 17), can we just stop by, or do we need an appointment?
Thanks,
D
-------------------------------
fine
--------------------------------
And that was that. What... the... fuck? She's completely unprofessional; she doesn't even attempt to use any sort of proper address or proper grammar (or even complete sentences), and she doesn't even sign her name. But I'll let that go. We've somehow decided as a society that it's OK to be completely informal via email no matter what the setting, so fine. The much bigger problem, as you can read, is that she doesn't answer my questions! Apparently, an entire sentence is too much for this woman to handle. I should have just emailed her, "appt?". The thing is, it's not like I went through the DC government directory and picked a person at random to email, I was told to contact (not just contact, but email, I wasn't even given a phone number) this woman specifically. She is the designated point person for this particular task. Communicating with people like me is explicitly part of her job, and this is how she handles it.
It's almost unbelievable. I'm embarrassed if I notice I so much as made a typo emailing somebody I don't know. Once, 11 years ago, I used the word "perspective" instead of "prospective" in an email to a professor, and it still bothers me today when I think about it. This is a whole different level, a whole different level of, I don't know what, laziness? Lack of pride? Something. As I always say when I encounter somebody like Ms. X, "14 million people unemployed and you have a job?" What's worse is that she's a DC employee, so that $300 that comes out of my paycheck each month, this is where part of it is going. After exchanges like this, I get why the Tea Party exists, I don't like the Tea Party, I think its full of misguided people (to put it nicely), but I get why it exists.
Speaking of the Tea Party... we've come to my next retread, newly-announced vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Apparently "Etch A Sketch" Mitt went with the "bold pick", the young intellectual leader of the Republican party, Congressman Ryan. Except that Ryan isn't really intellectual, unless you use intellectual as an antonym for reality-based, which is essentially what it means when applied to a Republican today. It's funny how the stereotype is of effete liberal idealists, with their ivory towers and Ivy League degrees, who don't understand the real world, when it's the conservatives who seem not to get that the society doesn't function a certain way just because you think it should.
I'm pretty familiar with Paul Ryan, through a New Yorker story I read about him, and through Paul Krugman's repeatedtakedowns of his inane economic plan. Ryan is an Ayn Rand Republican, who is intent on pushing his square ideology down the round throats of the American people. When it doesn't fit, it's fine to pretend that it does and try to deceive others about it (and Ryan is joining the right ticket for this). Man, I'm sick of people like Paul Ryan. I wish they'd all just leave, go create their utopia on Mars or a pontoon in the middle of the ocean or something, just leave. Leave the US to people who actually want to understand and solve the real problems in our society, not to a bunch of people who read "Atlas Shrugged" at an impressionable age.
[Remember in second grade when you learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction?]
The silver lining is that Paul Ryan isn't really all that popular with the American people or at least the people of his home state Wisconsin (VP picks historically don't help a candidacy much, anyway), and the political forecaster Nate Silver currently has Obama as a 72% favorite to win the presidency. That's nice and all, but there is still plenty of time for the odds to change, and even if they don't, that still leaves a 28% chance for Romney. My boyhood hero Alvin Davis was a career .280 hitter -- just saying.
[Oh AD, why didn't you ever live up to your promise as a rookie in 1984?]
Alright, that's all for now. If you haven't yet, buy my brother's novel (search his name followed by the string "(Author)" on Facebook).
Alright, back at home this weekend. As I mentioned before, we went to S's parents in South Carolina for a baby shower last weekend. It was fun, but it's so much driving. We drove all day Friday, hung out and had the baby shower, then drove all day Sunday. It would've been nice to stay one more day, but we need to stockpile leave for when the baby comes.
When you're driving south you can always tell how far you're getting by the number of Waffle Houses you pass on the way. There was an Onionheadline once that read, "Mason-Dixon Line Renamed IHOP-Waffle House Line", which is pretty hilarious.
[Yep, heading south.]
We didn't eat at a Waffle House, but we did eat at Bob Evans on the way there and Friendly's on the way back. They gave me a free sundae with my meal at Friendly's. It's funny how people will almost always take something if it's "free". I didn't really want a sundae. It had nothing to do with money. I'm sure we could've managed the $2.00 it costs to buy one if I did want one. I just didn't feel like it -- I had been eating like crap all weekend. But, when the waitress offered me a "free" sundae (which just means it's built into the price of the meals), I thought, "Free sundae?! Heck yeah!" So I took it, even though, again, nothing changed from earlier when I intentionally didn't order a sundae, other than the nominally price, which we could have covered from the loose change in our dash.
Giving people fake discounts is a pretty common and from what I can tell effective marketing strategy. I talked about it before in this blog entry. Basically when it comes to businesses, there is no such thing as free, that's why they're businesses, not charities. But pretending there is -- like Southwest Airline's "Bags Fly Free" promotion of Friendly's free sundae deal -- can apparently entice people, even if they know it's BS.
[View from the baby shower venue. It looks like a great place to hang out, except it was 100 frickin' degrees outside. It's just as bad in DC. I'm ready for this oppressive heat to be done.]
Anyway, on to the baby shower. It was fun. It was Indian-style, so there was way too much food (that's a staple in any cultural festivity, I think, but in this case it was Indian food), there was a lot of banter in dialects I don't understand, and there was a little ceremony that involved touching gifts and having rice thrown on my head. These Indian events usually evolve so that all the men are in one section, all the women are in another section, and then I'm just wandering around. I started playing with the kids after a while, although that's primarily just because I like playing with kids. Few things are more fun than wrestling ten little kids at once.
I also spent some time talking to a couple other whiteys -- a good friend of S has a brother who lives in SC, near S's parents, so he came with his girlfriend. They're pretty cool. They both in the military -- the Army Reserves, or something that. I didn't quite understand it, but I got the impression that they aren't seeing a combat zone anytime soon. It's funny because the guy was eating some pakoras (spicy deep fried vegetables, they're really good), and he suddenly made a face, opened him mouth, and started fanning his mouth and breaking out in a sweat, "Holy Jesus! These things are hot! My mouth is on fire."
I was chowing them down like nothing, "You think these are hot?"
"Uh, ye-ah... I'm sweating here."
"Hmm... I hadn't noticed," I shrugged my shoulders.
[Baby shower paraphernalia.]
I've become that guy. The guy who acts like super spicy food isn't spicy and makes it a point to pretentiously comment on just how un-spicy it is. I've never liked that guy. But the thing is, it honestly didn't even register that they were hot. I wasn't being pretentious; I was being genuine. S puts chilies in just about everything she makes, literally. Mixed vegetable and couscous -- chilies; quiche -- chilies; scrambled eggs -- chilies; guacamole -- chilies; biryani -- well, you get the idea. You just get used to it after a while. In fact, I sometimes get a little worried that I'll become too used to it, and non-spicy things will taste bland to me. I actually make it a point to not eat spicy things very often other than the dinners S makes. I don't want to get to the point where I'm dumping hot sauce in soup or crushed red pepper flakes on pizza, just to make them not taste boring.
Anyway, that's all the time I have this week. But before I go, I want to mention that for those of you who know my brother, he wrote a book. It's a sci-fi / fantasy novella. You should all check it out. You can find info about it on Facebook, just search for my brother's name followed by "(Author)" -- it should come up. (By the way, is the never-ending scroll bar on Facebook not one of the most annoying things in the world?)
