Entry 196: The 'Hood, One Year Down

It has now been one year in the 'hood for me -- fatherhood, that is.  And in that year I've developed enough material to fill a hack-y comedy book.

Here are some of my thoughts.

• All childbirth classes and childbirth books are a waste of time and money.  I sorta suspected this before I had a kid, now I know it for sure.
• It's not fair that breastfeeding mothers have to be the ones who wake up and do all the nighttime feedings, but it worked out very well for me.
• My kid was breech, and he has two top teeth stubs, but nothing on the bottom.  I think he's developing upside down.
• The only OTC medicine I'll give my kid is fever reducer if he has a fever.  I'm convinced everything is else bunk.
• A decent smell-resistant diaper pale is a good investment.  Slight wafts of poo is a huge upgrade from an effluvial deluge of poo.
• My wife is much more into sterilization than I am. 
• You find yourself hanging out with adults who happen to have a kid the same age as yours much more than your friends.
• Breaking Bad is a great show.  This has nothing to do with kids.  I just still have last night's episode rattling around in my brain.  I'm completely buying into the Breaking Bad hype, reading the "precaps" and recaps and all that.  Bryan Cranston might be the greatest actor ever.  If you think this is hyperbole then ask yourself how it is that Walt White and the dad from Malcolm in the Middle can possibly be the same person.  I literally can't get these two characters to cohere in my head.
  
  
   
• My son is super small (like third percentile in weight), but he's fast and agile.  I feel like after you say your kid is super small, you have to follow it up with something he or she does well.
• Kids can fall distances of up to three feet onto hard surfaces and have not so much as a bruise on them.
• Sick kids are awful.  Mothers' of sick kids aren't exactly rays of sunshine either.
• Pictures of kids are the best part of Facebook.
• The worst part about being a parent is having to put up with all the stupid shit (music, videos, toys, etc.) your kid likes.  Things like The Muppet Show are a godsend.
• My son has long curls in the back, and I really want to give him a baby mullet, but my wife doesn't like the idea.
• Babies and evening parties at which there are no other babies are a bad mix.
• We had a party recently, and we started it at 11 a.m., and it all made perfect sense.
• Somehow babies know which remote control actually controls the device you're using, and they want it.
• The lack of sleep is the one thing all parents say completely sucks about being a parent that completely sucks.

 Speaking of which, it's getting late.

Until next time...

Entry 195: Shoulders and Birdseed

In my last post I forgot to talk about something weird that happened on the drive from Rockport to Boston.  The first major leg of the trip is along U.S. 1, a windy highway with two lanes, one in each direction.  In my younger days when I'd find myself on such a road I'd be passing people whenever I saw breaks in the yellow line, but these days I'm mellower, and if I get behind a slowpoke I just ride it out.*  Since 1 is the only north-south thoroughfare in the area, and major junctions are miles apart, I ended up driving behind the same guy for a very long stretch.

At first there was nothing noteworthy about this, but then after a few miles, he suddenly starts driving on the shoulder.  Not all the way on the shoulder; he's half-on-half-off, like the line delineating the shoulder is perfectly in the middle of his car.  I have no idea why.  I was using the lane properly and can report there was nothing wrong with the left half of it.  And it's not like he just wasn't paying attention and drifting a little.  He was steering his car like it was on rails, just not on rails that are in the actual lane designated for automobile travel.

It really bothered me, not because it was particularly unsafe or anything, but because -- Why the eff would you intentionally drive your car half on the shoulder?!  He did it for a long time too, more than 10 miles, and even when there were bumps or debris on the shoulder he'd just drive right through it instead of coming into the lane to avoid it.  Like I said, weird.  I really wanted to pull up next to him and ask him why he was doing this, but, alas, I never got the chance.  I guess I'll never know.

Something else weird happened to me Saturday, although it was weird in a very different kind of way.  I was waiting in line at our local hardware store.  (I was just replacing the Soda Stream canisters not actually buying tools or anything.  C'mon, now.)  It was momentarily stopped because some guy was doing a return or something that required the cashier to check a bunch of receipts and look up a bunch of stuff, and a woman came up to me and started asking me about Lil' S who was sleeping in the stroller.  Her accent made me think she was from Africa, so after she left I started thinking about countries in Africa.  In particular, I thought of the country Niger, and how in first grade, in an attempt to show off my reading skills, I pointed to it on a map and proudly pronounced it N-word.  (As a six-year old I was stronger in phonics, than I was in racial sensitivities.)  Then I started thinking about the baseball player Nyjer Morgan and wondering if his parents just made the name up or if it came from somewhere.  Are there other Nyjers?  As I was finishing this thought I looked to my right and saw this.

What.  The.   Hell.  This might be the craziest, most useless coincidence that's ever happened to me.  It's not like I was thinking of the name Phillip and then saw a Phillips screwdriver.  I was thinking of Nyjer.  How many times in the average life does Nyjer cross one's mind?  And then to immediately see nyjer seed after that, which I didn't even know was a thing -- that's some Twilight Zone shit right there.  (Granted it would be a pretty boring episode.)

I even thought that maybe I saw the seed earlier and was unconsciously remembering it, but that doesn't make sense because it didn't just pop into my head randomly.  I took a very linear path to get to Nyjer, and the instant I arrived there I saw the nyjer seed.  Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.  (That's The Twilight Zone theme, by the way.)     



Until next time...

*Actually it's probably more passenger related than it is age related.  You can't be blowing by people in the opposite lane with a baby (or a disapproving wife) in the car.

Entry 194: Maine, a Weekend In Review

Our weekend trip to Maine for our friends K's & B's wedding went well, all things considered.  It was a bit of an ordeal, but I'm finding everything is a bit of an ordeal when you have an infant child.  Just staying home is trying.  I think going from DC to LA is actually easier than going from DC to Rockport, Maine because it's more direct.  To get to Rockport we had to first fly to Boston, rent a car in Boston, and then drive another six hours.  It should have only been about three hours, but it was pouring rain and traffic was thick just about the entire way.  It was not a fun drive.

Things got off to a bad start at Logan Airport when we (S, Lil' S, our friend E, and I) waited for every piece of luggage to come out and our car seat never showed up.  It was at some other pickup point for irregularly shaped items, which E eventually discovered by wandering around.  It wasn't even in sight of our carousel.  No sign, no announcement.  I hate when businesses do this -- when they just expected you to know something you have no way of knowing.  Like we're all former employees or something.  When we flew from LA to Seattle the car seat came out on the carousel like all the other luggage.  Why would we think it wouldn't at this airport unless somebody told us otherwise? 

[Once we woke up in our hotel to this view, things were OK.]

It didn't get immediately better from there.  If, by some chance, you have to rent a car at Logan anytime in the near future do not go with Thrifty.  It's awful.  No matter what you save, it's not worth it.  For starters, they aren't even that close to the airport; on the shuttle ride I started to wonder if it was taking us all the way to Maine.  Then a customer returning a car was blocking the shuttle loading/unloading zone, which is the only area with cover (I assume this is why the customer was using it), so we sat there and waited for him to move, which he didn't do, and instead of getting him to move, the bus just dropped us off in the pouring rain.  So, one guy parks where he isn't supposed to, nobody stops him, and an entire bus of customers and their luggage got soaked -- makes sense.  Then the woman at the counter tried to upsell me on a bunch of shit I didn't want; then she told me my credit card wouldn't be charged until after we returned the car, which wasn't true.*  The place just sucks.  I see they're getting torn apart on Yelp, which they should.  (Although, to be fair, the return was quick and easy.)

We were expecting the drive from MA to ME to be idyllic and breezy, instead it was dismal and dreary.  Just a thick blanket of wet grayness and bumper to bumper traffic almost the entire 185 miles.  I couldn't even get the jams going.  I found the local classic rock station on the radio and got excited when they announced three straight commercial-free rock blocks were coming at me.  First, the Eagles.  I hate the fucking Eagles, man.  Next up, the Stones.  Nice (so I think).  The first song they play is "Gimme Shelter", which is a good song.  They follow it up with "Shattered", which is an awful song -- the worst in their catalog.  Actually, I take that back, the worst song is "Start Me Up", which is what they played next.  The finale was "Satisfaction" -- a great song... the first 1,500 times you hear it.  So of all the songs in the Rolling Stones amazing catalog they played one decent song, two shitty songs**, and a good song that it's impossible to derive joy from because it's so fucked out.  The next rock block was Def Leppard.  I just turned off the radio.



We finally got into Rockport about 6:45 p.m., three to four hours later than we were expecting.  We had to shake a tail to get to a cocktail event that started at 7.  S was so deflated and tired of dealing with Lil' S (she was in the back seat on entertainment duty during the drive) that she just wanted to put him to bed and stay in, so I had to give her the stern, "Hey, we came all the way here.  This is a one-time thing for K & B.  We're going."  Which worked, but then I pushed things too far by getting on her case to hurry things along ("What are you doing?  You can unpack everything and put it away later!").  This caused a mini-fight and delayed us by at least 15 minutes.  We hustled to get there and of course the bride and groom and wedding party weren't even there yet.  It was just us and a bunch of old people for the first half hour.

Maine and the wedding were very cool though.  It cleared up the day after we arrived and was gorgeous the entire weekend.  We lucked out in that regard.  The ceremony was really quick and sweet, and the reception and after-party apparently went all night.  I bowed out early on dad duty.  I thought I was at least sparing myself a hangover by not staying out late, but I woke up in the middle of the night with my stomach just killing me.  There's an episode of The Simpsons where they go to Itchy & Scratchy land and one of the theme areas is called Searing Gas Pain Land, and that's what my stomach felt like -- it felt like the picture below.

I actually drove to a convenience store at 1:30 a.m. to buy (and quickly down) a bottle of Pepto Bismal.  It helped, but it certainly didn't bring me total relief.  I couldn't sleep and woke up feeling like I had been up all night drinking.  Sometimes when I travel the pipes get a little clogged (a phenomenon not unique to me, I've since learned); combine that with a few slices of pizza and a few beers, and that's me fucked.  So, I got to experience the hangover without the party.  Super.

We got in on Friday, the wedding was Saturday, we spent Sunday sight-seeing, and headed out Monday.  Of course, we left super early Monday morning and sailed right through, hitting almost no traffic.  We got to the airport like three hours before our flight left.  Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal, but entertaining the little guy in an airport is exhausting.  There is shit all over the ground he tries to put in his mouth, and he constantly wants to get into other people's bags.  He was super fussy the entire flight home -- a short flight, thankfully.  The 50-something-year old man sitting in front of us was visibly annoyed by having a baby behind him.  I felt bad for him until I noticed he was reading one of those Cosmo-for-men-type magazines.  For some reason this absolved me of all compunction.

Until next time...

*What happened is I was late making a credit card payment, so despite being nowhere near my limit I couldn't use my card until the payment cleared (about a day).  So instead I gave them my bank card under the assurance that it was just collateral, the card wouldn't actually be charged, and I could pay with a different card when I returned (and my other card would be freed by then).  But my bank card actually was charged (and then refunded when I paid with the other card), drawing the account down to $0.  When I went to use it over the weekend it was decline.  Thankfully, my other one was available at that point.  I can't remember ever having a single card denied, and then I had two denied in a span of three days.  Embarrassing.  It's mainly my fault for not paying my bill on time, but the woman at the Thrity counter certainly didn't do me any favors by giving me information that wasn't exactly accurate.

**By the way, this is one of the many reasons the Beatles are superior to the Stones.  There are no "Shattered"s or "Start Me Up"s in The Fab Four's catalog.

Entry 193: A Quick Quickie Written Quickly

Not a lot of time to write tonight, so I'm just going to bang out a quickie.  For those of you expecting wine and candles and a massage, it's not going to happen.

This month is a busy month for us.  Most of it is fun stuff, so I'm not complaining, just saying.  Last weekend my sister and brother-in-law and kids came out to visit, which was super fun.  Her youngest of two boys, G, just turned five, and he acts like it.  He kept getting annoyed with Lil' S, because Lil' S would come over and try to play with him, which entailed grabbing and messing up whatever he was holding at the time (often a Lego structure).  So G would get upset, which of course is hilarious being that what Lil' S was doing to him is exactly what he's constantly doing to his older brother.  If only five-year olds could understand irony.

["Stand By Me" was set in Oregon, but the novella whence it was adapted, "The Body" was set in Maine, which makes sense being that it was written by Stephen King.  By the way, on the Wikipedia page for Jerry O'Connell it says "Redirected From the Fat Kid in Stand By Me".  Well, that's definitely a better legacy than "Kangaroo Jack".]

Tomorrow we're headed to Maine for our friends' wedding, Rockport, Maine, as it is.  I've never been to any city in Maine, Rockport or elsewhere, so I guess after this weekend I'll be able to cross a new state off my list.  Actually, I have no such list, not even a mental one.  If I tried to name all the states I've visited I'd have to sit down and really think about it.  Also, I'd have to come up with some rules.  Airport-only layovers definitely wouldn't count, but what if I drove through a state but never got out of the car?  Or only got out to eat and get gas and use the bathroom?  (Maybe it'd count if it was number two, but not number one.)  What if I drove entirely in the dark, stayed in a hotel, woke up the next morning while it was still dark and crossed the state line before dawn had broken? 

I actually did that in Kansas on a cross-country trip once.  I stayed in the shittiest hotel I've ever been in, hands down.  It was worse than that hotel on Breaking Bad where that hooker with the messed up teeth hangs out (by the way, can't wait for the final half-season, Sunday, baby).  But it was cheap, and I just needed a place to crash for the night.  What was the harm?  I mean, other than the crabs.

Alright, that's it.  Until next time...

Entry 192: Classic Crocodile (2/28/2008)

On an old flash drive, I recently came across a Word document containing entries from a blog I used to keep on MySpace, back before MySpace became uncool and everybody migrated to Facebook for reasons unknown to me (I just followed along).  Since I'm a bit short on free time this week, I figured I'd post something from this old blog.  Enjoy a little "Classic Crocodile".

(By the way, I'm copying and pasting this directly, so if there are typos you can't get mad at me.  Well, you can, but you have to do it five years ago.)

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2/22/08

I got my haircut today.  It was 15 minutes of pain.  The stylist (the receptionist said that since I had long hair, i.e. not a buzz-cut, she would specifically set me up with a stylist, not a barber) was one of the most irritating people I've ever had talk at me.  Her mouth was directly at ear level also, which makes a big difference.  There was no distance to soften the intensity of her sound waves.  They were able to hammer my eardrum unabated.  It was terrible.

When I first sat down in her chair I told her to shave it on the side with a 3 guard, blend it up, and trim it on top.  That’s how I’ve done it the other 176 times I’ve had my haircut as an adult.   She said, “huh… so do you want it shaved on the sides, or do you just want a normal haircut?”
“ Uh… I guess a normal haircut, but usually they use clippers on the side… it usually ends up looking pretty norm-… I mean, is that not a normal haircut?”
“It’s just like I was telling the customer before.  Guys always come in her asking for their sides shaved, but all they want is a normal haircut.    Why don’t they just ask for that?  I never understood it.  I used to teach a class and I’d always talk about the normal haircut, etc., etc.” 

She went on for a solid five minutes about the normal haircut (which I ended up getting, and for the record, it does look quite normal).  Then she just said whatever she was thinking, no matter how incoherent or insignificant.  It was as if she couldn’t think a thought without verbalizing it, and she’d end everything with, “I know, right?”  Even though I didn’t say anything, she answered her own non-sequiturs with, “I know, right?”  Anyway, luckily she moved quickly, or I would have just walked out, and then my hair would be all fucked-up and half-cut.

***
So I was thinking today if society would be better off without car horns.  If everything in the world was the same, but cars didn’t have horns, would the aggregate effect be a plus, or a minus?  I came to the conclusion that it would be a plus, maybe a big plus.  The obvious downside is that occasionally one’s horn prevents somebody from running into them.  Like if somebody is changing lanes and doesn’t see you, if you have no horn, you can’t do much about it.  But I think the instances in which the horn actually matters are extremely rare.  Usually they hit you anyway, because you honk too late or because they can’t react fast enough, or they see you and veer away, or you can veer away.  The honk, I feel, is largely ineffective.  Primarily it is used as a way to signify one’s anger which just heightens the general rage level and makes the roads more dangerous. 

For instance, if somebody is “blocking the box” which happens frequently in DC everybody lays on their horns, but there is no place for the person to go.  If they could get out of the way they would.  The fact that they are stuck is precisely the problem.  Granted they should not have tried to make it across the intersection in the first place, but honking about it is not going to do anything about that.  It’s just noise pollution, and it makes people stressed out and pissed off, which are probably not the best states to be in while driving (or really doing anything, for that matter, except maybe fighting).  Another example: the other day I was awoken rudely, because a woman on my street was honking at the garbage truck who was taking up the entire street and driving quite slowly (which is very reasonable, the streets are narrow, and they were collecting trash).  Of course the garbage men didn’t give a shit.  They just kept on doing their thing, so the entire neighborhood had to hear this bitchy lady’s horn all the way up the street, for nothing.  It didn’t get her anywhere more quickly.  And by the way, there’s a little turn-in where she could have just turned around.  I try to use my horn sparingly (although tonight somebody cut me off badly and I honked and flipped them off, illustrating precisely why horns are bad).  I do like to give a little beep if somebody doesn’t notice a light has changed, but I would gladly give that up for a car-horn-free world.

By the way, “About a Boy” -- really, really good so far.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through it, and it’s.  I’m curious to see it now.

[2013 DG here.  I've somewhat changed my stance on car horns.  I still think they're a net negative for society, but I'm not sure my "block the box" rationale is sound.  Honking at people who block the box might be an effective way of shaming them into not doing it again in future.  It's tough to say.]