You would think after having been a parent for over six years, and also having the circus act of friends I have, that nothing would surprise me. Day after day, though, I am confronted with mental hurdles barring me from even basic understanding.
Today I showed up at summer camp to pick up our girls Lorelei (6) and Rachel (4), and made a point of walking in with a big smile on my face. I knew the girls would be disappointed their mother was having dinner with a friend, and I wanted to seize this opportunity for dad to gain some cool points.
When I walk in, Rachel is seated near the front of the gym wearing a logo camp shirt rather than the one she wore this morning. I know kids have accidents all the time, especially 4 year old kids, from spilling drinks to smearing paint (this kid only two weeks ago shoved a bead up her nose at craft time) so the costume change in itself was not terribly surprising. The rest, though…
Me: “What happened to your shirt from this morning?”
Rachel: “It got wet.”
Me: “How did it get wet?”
Rachel: “I put it in the toilet.”
Me: “What? Why?”
Rachel: “Lorelei told me to.”
Me: “Wait, what? “(I turned to Lorelei, who literally appeared out of nowhere) “Did you tell her to put her shirt in the toilet?”
Lorelei: “Yes.”
Me: “Just yes? What are you, a dumb ass? Why did you do that?”
Lorelei: “I don't know.”
Me: (turning back to Rachel) “And why did you listen to her?”
Rachel: “I don't know.”
And there we were three people standing there who did not understand why the shirt got put in the toilet.
Now, what I would like to have said to them:
“Lorelei, what the hell is wrong with you? Why would you ever tell anyone to put their shirt, or anything, in the toilet? Do clothes go in a public toilet, or any toilet for that matter? Let me answer that for you. No, they don’t. And you, Rachel, what the fuck man? She tells you to shove your shirt in the toilet, and you do it? What do you have rattling around in your head? It sure ain’t a brain.”
What I actually said:
I said nothing to Rachel, I just shook my head. When Shawn got home she laid out the old, “If someone told you to jump off a bridge” rationale. But let’s face it, reader, you and I know both know unless things change Rachel’s taking a header off that bridge.
To Lorelei, I said, “I’m very disappointed. Taking advantage of or hurting someone who is smaller or weaker is one of the worst things you can do. (pause) Unless it is a matter of foreign policy and secures our position in an unstable region, locks up a scarce resource, or allows a series of under experienced presidents to flex their command authority at the expense of American lives. Then, evidently, it is acceptable. But, for the record, I was not on board with any of that, and if those decisions were made in this house, none of those things would have happened.”
There just really are so many reasons I am not meant to be a parent.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Rachel, I
Many of my friends have heard me describe my 4 year old daughter, Rachel, as being one small degree away from being the Batman villain played by Heath Ledger, the Joker. Allow me to provide an example of her diabolical intelligence.
Candy has been our “when no family is available” sitter of choice for two years now. She is reliable, safety trained, and most importantly takes no crap off of Rachel. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
You can imagine our surprise then when at 2 AM after Candy had watched the kids one night when Rachel, who is not nighttime trained but wears a pull-up to bed, came in our room having wet the bed. Rachel came in, woke Shawn (and me by association only as she could not give two shits about me) and went in the bathroom to take off her pajamas and throw her pull-up away and get cleaned up. Shawn changed the sheets, cleaned Rachel and got her fresh PJs.
I told Candy about this the next day and asked her to make sure Rachel put the pull-up on correctly as she has been known to put them on backwards. Candy said she would make sure.
Skip forward to the next time Candy came over, and the entire scene repeats itself. Now, Rachel never overflows a pull-up, and she had done it twice in two weeks, both when Candy came over. Everyone thinks Rachel is so cute and falls for her shit. Not me. I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I thought I had it figured out, but needed to catch her in the act.
Next time Candy comes over, scene repeats, except this time I jump out of bed and catch Rachel in the bathroom before the PJs come off and the pull-up goes in the trash and sure enough, the PJs are bone dry. I looked at her, she refused to make eye contact with me, and I said, “You, little miss, are busted.” Cue the quivering lip fake whimper.
We give both kids a spill proof water bottle when they go to sleep to avoid the BS “can I have a drink of water” requests. Rachel was taking the bottle and pouring it out in the bed so she could have an excuse to wake up Shawn. Evil. Just evil. Shawn missed the fact Rachel’s PJs were dry the first two times because in her half asleep stupor she would wash Rachel off and grab the PJs with the towel and throw them all in the washer.
Problem solved, right?
Nope, because the next time Candy came over Rachel took off her pull-up in bed and peed.
That might not be the pencil in eye the Joker gave that one dude, but everybody has to start somewhere.
Behind the cute smile lies the mind of an arch criminal.To say Rachel clings to my wife Shawn is like saying the chocolate in a Reese’s cup clings to the wrapper on a summer day. The way she attaches herself to Shawn might be endearing if it weren’t first and foremost so goddamn pathetic. I have my theories as to why she is this way which go far beyond any normal mother / child affection, but I’ll save those for the confines of our home. I will say, though, that the only three people on this Earth who do not take the shit this kid shovels are myself, my mother-in-law and Rachel’s daycare teacher and our preferred babysitter, Candy.
Candy has been our “when no family is available” sitter of choice for two years now. She is reliable, safety trained, and most importantly takes no crap off of Rachel. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
You can imagine our surprise then when at 2 AM after Candy had watched the kids one night when Rachel, who is not nighttime trained but wears a pull-up to bed, came in our room having wet the bed. Rachel came in, woke Shawn (and me by association only as she could not give two shits about me) and went in the bathroom to take off her pajamas and throw her pull-up away and get cleaned up. Shawn changed the sheets, cleaned Rachel and got her fresh PJs.
I told Candy about this the next day and asked her to make sure Rachel put the pull-up on correctly as she has been known to put them on backwards. Candy said she would make sure.
Skip forward to the next time Candy came over, and the entire scene repeats itself. Now, Rachel never overflows a pull-up, and she had done it twice in two weeks, both when Candy came over. Everyone thinks Rachel is so cute and falls for her shit. Not me. I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I thought I had it figured out, but needed to catch her in the act.
Next time Candy comes over, scene repeats, except this time I jump out of bed and catch Rachel in the bathroom before the PJs come off and the pull-up goes in the trash and sure enough, the PJs are bone dry. I looked at her, she refused to make eye contact with me, and I said, “You, little miss, are busted.” Cue the quivering lip fake whimper.
We give both kids a spill proof water bottle when they go to sleep to avoid the BS “can I have a drink of water” requests. Rachel was taking the bottle and pouring it out in the bed so she could have an excuse to wake up Shawn. Evil. Just evil. Shawn missed the fact Rachel’s PJs were dry the first two times because in her half asleep stupor she would wash Rachel off and grab the PJs with the towel and throw them all in the washer.
Problem solved, right?
Nope, because the next time Candy came over Rachel took off her pull-up in bed and peed.
That might not be the pencil in eye the Joker gave that one dude, but everybody has to start somewhere.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Greatest Hits, I
Introduction, preamble, what have you:
I often go back to the columns I wrote in college with the intent of somehow ‘collecting’ them into a bound edition, much like I did with my ‘Top Ten’ collections from the same time (which made me something like $40 dollars, total, over two books). I realize there is virtually no audience for this, but I need to do it in order to close that creative chapter in my life so I can do something else.
I had a similar issue after high school, which I finally closed out in 1997 in college when I wrote my mammoth “Haunted by Spirit” piece for the college paper. When I finished that piece it was like a weight lifted off me. It was after that I did my best work as a columnist. “Haunted” kicked a door open for me fan wise, beyond friends and friends of friends, and now random strangers were coming up to me, thanks to my editor’s insistence that my email address run under the column, which, 15 years ago, was not the norm it is today.
During that period I alternated between campus issues, national news issues, and the circus sideshow that comprise my friends. It all had a larger following than I had any right to have.
In order to counter this, as I was massively uncomfortable with celebrity even on that myopic level (and yes, I appreciate the irony of that discomfort in a blogger), one of the post-“Haunted” pieces was a verbatim recounting of my friend Bobby and I’s trip to the Price Club. It was pure filler, massively offensive, and written because I had no other ideas and a deadline. It ran on a Thursday, traditionally the slower of the paper’s two publication days.
Naturally, it was a colossal hit.
After the Price Club column, I received a steady stream of requests for more Bobby columns. I routinely told people Bobby was a person, not a fictional character, so he actually needed to do something worth writing about, or at least entertaining, in order for me to write more columns. This was not entirely accurate, as I could make a career of just telling stories about Bobby, but the reality is he did so much best described as “out there” that if I told it all no one would believe it.
Gentle reader - take in the story below, one of my many “holy shit” moments with Bobby. It has no real ending. And neither does Bobby. He’s still out there, keepin’ on.
FYI – if elements of this seem dated, they are. This took place in ’97 or ’98.
Greatest Hits, I
Today, rather than bore you with commentary concerning the minutiae of the world around us, we will revel once again in the domain of that bonehead of boneheads, the master of disaster, my old friend Bobby.
For those of you who are new, I’ve written about Bobby a number of times before. Bobby, to give you a little background, is that friend of yours that your girlfriend hates. The one your mother calls “loser.” You can rest assured that if, for whatever reason, I don’t have something to write about one day, I’m going to crack open the Bobby vault. For all of his loathsome qualities, he still is if nothing else a constant source of entertainment.
I would like to end this preface by saying that this is a bit outlandish and quite possibly disgusting, so, the faint of heart may want to skip over to the Style Section.
Bobby does not work anymore. He is one of the tech geeks I detest who never did any real work in his life, cashed out his stock options and at twenty four spends most of his time at the driving range. That or, on days when the weather isn’t so hot, he plays with his newest toy, his DVD player.
I recently arrived at his pad after work to find him and his roommate, Phil, watching “Heat” (one of my favorite movies, best gunfight in history, hands down). Rather, Phil was watching the movie and eating peanut M & Ms while Bobby was banging his head against the wall. Not mosh pit forehead banging, but the left side of his head.
This action begged the question. “What are you doing?”
He explained that he has been in the pool yesterday and still had water in his ear, and he was trying to shake it out. While odd, this was far from the stupidest thing he ever said (so very far, in fact) that I just let it go and sat down to watch the movie. Bobby drifted into his room and eventually the banging stopped.
If only it ended there.
About ten minutes went by before Bobby emerged from his room and asked Phil where his Swiss Army knife was. This sent off alarm bells in my head. Phil told him where it was and I half yelped, “What do you need that for?”
There was no answer.
At this point, this story’s going to get ugly. There is no time like the present to go to the Style Section.
Bobby emerged from the bedroom with this, this brownish-yellow “thing,” in the tweezers from the Swiss Army knife.
He opened his mouth to speak, and I felt like someone about to receive cancer test results. “This was in my ear.”
And Phil piped in. “Is that wax?”
You’re damn right it was.
They set it on the coffee table, and my mind finally kicked in gear so I could ask, “What are you doing with it? Throw it away.” I’ll be honest, it frightened me.
Bobby just stared at it in shock. Phil took a piece of his candy and held it next to the thing. “Holy shit, that’s the size of a peanut M & M. What’s wrong with you?”
All I could say was, “Aren’t you going to throw it away?”
They just stared at it.
I was becoming irate. “WHAT - ARE - YOU - GOING - TO - DO - WITH - IT?”
Take a moment and imagine the worst possible answer to that question.
Phil said, “I think we should smoke it.”
All I thought was, “What’s this we shit?”
Bobby sat that there staring, and I got a chill as it occurred to me that he might be considering it. Fortunately, reason prevailed. He said, “Nah, man, remember what happened when you smoked that scab?”
Waiter, check please.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I left. I don’t know what finally happened. I don’t care.
When I got home I locked the door behind me. My roommate looked at me like I was crazy, which wasn’t too far from the truth. All I could think to say was, “I gotta get some new friends.”
I had a nightmare about it. I’m afraid it’s still out there.
I often go back to the columns I wrote in college with the intent of somehow ‘collecting’ them into a bound edition, much like I did with my ‘Top Ten’ collections from the same time (which made me something like $40 dollars, total, over two books). I realize there is virtually no audience for this, but I need to do it in order to close that creative chapter in my life so I can do something else.
I had a similar issue after high school, which I finally closed out in 1997 in college when I wrote my mammoth “Haunted by Spirit” piece for the college paper. When I finished that piece it was like a weight lifted off me. It was after that I did my best work as a columnist. “Haunted” kicked a door open for me fan wise, beyond friends and friends of friends, and now random strangers were coming up to me, thanks to my editor’s insistence that my email address run under the column, which, 15 years ago, was not the norm it is today.
During that period I alternated between campus issues, national news issues, and the circus sideshow that comprise my friends. It all had a larger following than I had any right to have.
In order to counter this, as I was massively uncomfortable with celebrity even on that myopic level (and yes, I appreciate the irony of that discomfort in a blogger), one of the post-“Haunted” pieces was a verbatim recounting of my friend Bobby and I’s trip to the Price Club. It was pure filler, massively offensive, and written because I had no other ideas and a deadline. It ran on a Thursday, traditionally the slower of the paper’s two publication days.
Naturally, it was a colossal hit.
After the Price Club column, I received a steady stream of requests for more Bobby columns. I routinely told people Bobby was a person, not a fictional character, so he actually needed to do something worth writing about, or at least entertaining, in order for me to write more columns. This was not entirely accurate, as I could make a career of just telling stories about Bobby, but the reality is he did so much best described as “out there” that if I told it all no one would believe it.
Gentle reader - take in the story below, one of my many “holy shit” moments with Bobby. It has no real ending. And neither does Bobby. He’s still out there, keepin’ on.
FYI – if elements of this seem dated, they are. This took place in ’97 or ’98.
Greatest Hits, I
Today, rather than bore you with commentary concerning the minutiae of the world around us, we will revel once again in the domain of that bonehead of boneheads, the master of disaster, my old friend Bobby.
For those of you who are new, I’ve written about Bobby a number of times before. Bobby, to give you a little background, is that friend of yours that your girlfriend hates. The one your mother calls “loser.” You can rest assured that if, for whatever reason, I don’t have something to write about one day, I’m going to crack open the Bobby vault. For all of his loathsome qualities, he still is if nothing else a constant source of entertainment.
I would like to end this preface by saying that this is a bit outlandish and quite possibly disgusting, so, the faint of heart may want to skip over to the Style Section.
Bobby does not work anymore. He is one of the tech geeks I detest who never did any real work in his life, cashed out his stock options and at twenty four spends most of his time at the driving range. That or, on days when the weather isn’t so hot, he plays with his newest toy, his DVD player.
I recently arrived at his pad after work to find him and his roommate, Phil, watching “Heat” (one of my favorite movies, best gunfight in history, hands down). Rather, Phil was watching the movie and eating peanut M & Ms while Bobby was banging his head against the wall. Not mosh pit forehead banging, but the left side of his head.
This action begged the question. “What are you doing?”
He explained that he has been in the pool yesterday and still had water in his ear, and he was trying to shake it out. While odd, this was far from the stupidest thing he ever said (so very far, in fact) that I just let it go and sat down to watch the movie. Bobby drifted into his room and eventually the banging stopped.
If only it ended there.
About ten minutes went by before Bobby emerged from his room and asked Phil where his Swiss Army knife was. This sent off alarm bells in my head. Phil told him where it was and I half yelped, “What do you need that for?”
There was no answer.
At this point, this story’s going to get ugly. There is no time like the present to go to the Style Section.
Bobby emerged from the bedroom with this, this brownish-yellow “thing,” in the tweezers from the Swiss Army knife.
He opened his mouth to speak, and I felt like someone about to receive cancer test results. “This was in my ear.”
And Phil piped in. “Is that wax?”
You’re damn right it was.
They set it on the coffee table, and my mind finally kicked in gear so I could ask, “What are you doing with it? Throw it away.” I’ll be honest, it frightened me.
Bobby just stared at it in shock. Phil took a piece of his candy and held it next to the thing. “Holy shit, that’s the size of a peanut M & M. What’s wrong with you?”
All I could say was, “Aren’t you going to throw it away?”
They just stared at it.
I was becoming irate. “WHAT - ARE - YOU - GOING - TO - DO - WITH - IT?”
Take a moment and imagine the worst possible answer to that question.
Phil said, “I think we should smoke it.”
All I thought was, “What’s this we shit?”
Bobby sat that there staring, and I got a chill as it occurred to me that he might be considering it. Fortunately, reason prevailed. He said, “Nah, man, remember what happened when you smoked that scab?”
Waiter, check please.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I left. I don’t know what finally happened. I don’t care.
When I got home I locked the door behind me. My roommate looked at me like I was crazy, which wasn’t too far from the truth. All I could think to say was, “I gotta get some new friends.”
I had a nightmare about it. I’m afraid it’s still out there.
No Debt To Collect
It’s been far too long since I picked up the proverbial pen, or keyboard as it were, and there are a myriad of issues I feel compelled to address in our world as it stands today. But I’ll start with this…
I do not care for the suggestion, either direct or implied, by our pundits and social media participants that these Casey Anthony jurors owe the United States public an explanation. No juror owes me or you or anyone else an explanation. They do not owe anyone a press conference, or names or contact information or anything else. The deal we make with jurors is this: they perform their service and then they go home. That’s it.
If these people choose to discuss it, so be it. And if in doing so potentially let their service as a juror define the balance of their life, and potentially their family’s lives, so be it. But they do not have to, and we do not deserve anything from them.
I don’t envy those people. Take a moment and put yourself in their shoes. You know, from the get go, as a human being, that this woman is responsible for her child’s death. Assume for a moment the child actually did drown. That her mother failed to call 911 immediately, in my mind, convinced me of her guilt. I don’t care if she was molested or in any other way ill-treated. I know some horrible parents, and put in that spot any one of them makes the call to 911. Not making that call would have been a choice. And you take all that in on day one.
So you sit there, for weeks, hoping, begging with your eyes that the prosecution can bring this case home. But they don’t. They can’t. It just isn’t there. Did they fail? Did the police? They probably all did a little bit, in little ways.
So what are your choices during deliberations? Vote with your gut, or vote based on the rules of evidence as the judge has explained them? If you vote by the rules, you maybe send a murderer home, and you have to live with it. If you vote with your gut, maybe your gut is wrong. What if it is and you vote to send someone to their death? How do you live with that? We should not all be so cavalier when spared the weight of actual responsibility.
It is very easy to sit in the comfort of our homes, on our laptops and phones and pass judgment on these 12 people. But we haven’t walked a mile in their shoes. We haven’t even gotten off the couch. Agree with their verdict, don’t agree with it, and either way be happy you live in a country where you can do either. These people have no debt to us, and they owe you nothing.
I do not care for the suggestion, either direct or implied, by our pundits and social media participants that these Casey Anthony jurors owe the United States public an explanation. No juror owes me or you or anyone else an explanation. They do not owe anyone a press conference, or names or contact information or anything else. The deal we make with jurors is this: they perform their service and then they go home. That’s it.
If these people choose to discuss it, so be it. And if in doing so potentially let their service as a juror define the balance of their life, and potentially their family’s lives, so be it. But they do not have to, and we do not deserve anything from them.
I don’t envy those people. Take a moment and put yourself in their shoes. You know, from the get go, as a human being, that this woman is responsible for her child’s death. Assume for a moment the child actually did drown. That her mother failed to call 911 immediately, in my mind, convinced me of her guilt. I don’t care if she was molested or in any other way ill-treated. I know some horrible parents, and put in that spot any one of them makes the call to 911. Not making that call would have been a choice. And you take all that in on day one.
So you sit there, for weeks, hoping, begging with your eyes that the prosecution can bring this case home. But they don’t. They can’t. It just isn’t there. Did they fail? Did the police? They probably all did a little bit, in little ways.
So what are your choices during deliberations? Vote with your gut, or vote based on the rules of evidence as the judge has explained them? If you vote by the rules, you maybe send a murderer home, and you have to live with it. If you vote with your gut, maybe your gut is wrong. What if it is and you vote to send someone to their death? How do you live with that? We should not all be so cavalier when spared the weight of actual responsibility.
It is very easy to sit in the comfort of our homes, on our laptops and phones and pass judgment on these 12 people. But we haven’t walked a mile in their shoes. We haven’t even gotten off the couch. Agree with their verdict, don’t agree with it, and either way be happy you live in a country where you can do either. These people have no debt to us, and they owe you nothing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)