Laid-Off Dad

Clean as a whizzle

Every other Thursday, a very nice woman (whose name is not really Josephine) comes over and cleans our house. Front to back, port to starboard, floor to ceiling, Josephine scrubs and soaks and folds and makes the place look immaculate. After Robert was born, and all throughout the layoff, my wife and I decided that we'd live off of cat food and dryer lint before we cut the cleaning expense. Otherwise, we'd just never get ahead of the constant flow of stuff that breeds like a virus in our little home. That's rather apt, come to think of it: Our apartment is the host for a remarkably virulent and parasitic strain of the Dreck Flu (a/k/a "Binfluenza"), and Josephine is our bi-weekly shot of penicillin.

Yesterday I came home to find all of our laundry folded, Robert's toys stashed away in their bins, spotless and uncluttered countertops in the kitchen, and an omnipresent but not overpowering smell of lemony-piney cleaning products. Everything was cleaned and stored, and for a few fleeting moments order reigned over our two little chaos monkeys.

I was remarking about this to my wife when she went off into the bathroom to wash her hands. I surveyed my orderly little fief and said, "I love coming home on Thursdays. It's like I feel most like a human being once every two weeks."

And my wife swooped out of the bathroom, hands dripping, and said, "What? You want to be peeing on her every two weeks?!?"

XL (at last, my age matches my shirt size)

As I sit here and tell you that today is my 40th birthday, you might be asking, Why aren't you out carousing and alpha-drinking yourself silly, in keeping with the standard über-jag paradigm? Well, I did all of that, and less, at the surprise party my wife threw for me in Central Park yesterday. The plan was for me to work all morning and meet her and the boys at a cluster playdate for Robert's posse. I arrived with a headache and some nausea from reading on the bus, and when I began recognizing people from very diverse branches of my life-tree, I was completely buffaloed. (Truly. You can still see the horn marks.)

So thanks, sweetie, for working so incredibly hard and fighting back your primal impulse to burst out and spill the beans. Thanks to everyone who came out, and helped drag the furniture into the middle of a field, and bought me all of that wonderful high-end booze.

Thanks to Robert, for giving me the Bob the Builder birthday card three days ago (because you just couldn't wait), for helping Mama make my birthday cake, and for very courteously saying, "I could blow out the candles for you, Daddy, if you want."

Thanks to TwoBert, for laughing so freely at the "I'm Gonna Kiss Your Feet" song and continuing to laugh after I started filming you--instead of stopping all communication and staring blankly at the video camera like you normally do.

And thank you, Internets, for the gift of your attention. I remain amazed by the upward slope of my SiteMeter and by the positive effect the blog has had on my life. It's an odd feeling to make new friends and know that meeting them for the first time will seem like a long-overdue reunion.

Onward, then, into the fifth decade. If life begins at 40, then it's been one helluva long gestation period.

Breast plates

My wife is now a proud owner of a pair of Lilypadz. She says they take some time to get used to, but they're definitely worth the investment.

I give 'em a thumbs-up as well. It's like being married to Xena.

The permutations of perspiration

The subway stop at the work-end of my commute has five turnstiles, and when I arrived there this afternoon all five of them were blocked by people locked in the Fruitless Loop, which goes something like this:

1. Swipe MetroCard inadequately through the little electronic valley.
2. Bring card to face and examine intently, as a gorilla might a calculator.
3. Flip over card, repeat Step 2.
4. Furrow brow. Shrug. Roll eyes. Exhale animatedly.
5. Go to Step 1.

While I paced behind this Phalanx of Futility, a train had time to enter the station, exchange passengers, and take off half-full down the line after shutting its doors in my face. And I waited for 15 sultry minutes as rush-hour-propelled humanoids began to clog the platform. The next train finally arrived predictably crammed to capacity, and the car I managed to shove my way into had no air conditioning. So I stood and sweated for two stops, until someone's grumpy bowels let loose a force that would have cleared the room--if the room weren't a sealed metal tube 30 feet underground.

I spent the rest of the trip playing out the numbers in my head. The subway's swipe-card system, which is breathtakingly inconvenient, conservatively delays about 1 in 10 riders every day. That means the odds that all five turnstiles would be clogged simultaneously is 1 in 10⁵, or 100,000. I'm at that station for one 5-minute stretch per day (5 out of 1,440), five days a week (5/7). There were 15 cars in the train, so if we make the bold assumption that mine was the only car with no AC, I had a 1/15 chance of landing in it. 

That puts the composite probability of this rank-n-dank chain of events at 1 in 60,480,00o, or about one-fourth the chance of winning the lottery. And all I won was the opportunity to breathe through my mouth and sweat like a monkey on a spit for half an hour.

That's the mercurial thing about numbers. They can help unlock the secrets of the universe, but they can also gang up and fart in your face.

A proclamation for the 21st century

I got home a little earlier than usual today, offering me the chance to party with the kids a little bit before dinner. As I was changing into my wrasslin' clothes, my wife came into the room beaming ear to ear and holding a sheet of paper--a list of the names and addresses of the parents of Robert's preschool classmates. We looked at each other, knowing our task was clear:

"Let the Googling begin!"

You know, just in case any of my son's new friends are being raised by freaks.

The migratory patterns of the wet-chested warbler

When I put up my first post at the old domain, Robert was 15 months old and had already passed a lot of important firsts. He had teeth, he was walking and talking, and he'd eaten his first cake of soap. Thus, the world missed out on the early months, when little larva-children start studying things intently, and they laugh when you kiss them behind the ear, and they show the first signs of becoming something of a person.

Therefore, since TwoBert recently turned four months old, and Typepad tells me this is my 200th post (!) under its aegis, I thought I would devote this space to TwoBert's State of the Baby Address.

Four months is indeed a magic age, primarily because of the Cuteness. TwoBert's eyes, a deep blue that is slowly hazeling over, are still way too large for his fuzzy head, which has but a slim tonsure wending its way around the base of his neck. Imagine a fat-cheeked Peter Boyle cast as a Precious Moments figurine.

TwoBert is also learning that there's more to interact with than just my wife's breasts. (Sure, I still rate a distant second, but I'm gaining ground.) We converse now. I can unburden myself about the most ridiculous things that are rattling around in my head, but as long as I smile and waggle my eyebrows he'll pump his legs and cackle supportively. He also loves to sing along to mah-na mah-na, often in a warble that sounds like "ooooooooolllluuuuuurrrrrr" and equivocates between A-sharp and B-flat. The other primary noise is his dead-on impression of a creaking door.

The object impermanence (which he gets from his mother) is a plus, because every meeting starts with a clean slate. There's never any baggage. TwoBert can go without seeing me during the workday, or even for half an hour, and when we're reunited he reacts with such elated surprise. "Hey! The amusing man is back! I thought he was dead!"

The teething is a minus, because it's getting worse and has no end in sight. He'll be dozing away and then jolt awake with a violent yelp, and the copious drool that lately defines his existence will have backed into his nasal passages, waiting not-so-patiently for a groggy parent to suck it out with our mini turkey baster (which is actually a nostril un-baster). You should see this drool, folks. The boy can saturate a bib in the blink of an eye. Every day is a new Genesis flood in Sternum Valley.

Most of this is pretty common four-month-old fare. On a more individual note, his current favorite thing is screwing his face into a scowl, clasping his hands together, and arm-wrestling with himself. As far as we know, no one among our large extended family has made a living in professional bodybuilding, so he may be poised to fill that gap. (If he needs us to help fulfill that dream, we have plenty of baby oil.)

And secondly, he can't stand the fact that he can't stand. He shares his living space with three fully functional bipeds, walking and skipping and dancing around to Earth Wind & Fire, and he wants in. Lying around is so last month; if I place him on the floor, he flops and arches and grunts himself over and out of his Boppy, begging me to pull him up into a standing position. When I do, he clamps onto my fingers and stands rigidly until the unfettered bliss breaks his concentration and buckles his knees. Then he launches into a beatific smile that buckles mine.

Defoliant

If napalm in the morning smells like victory, are we to infer that this stuff smells like napalm?

If so, would this guy use it?

Discuss.

Attack of the frorks!

I'm not impressed by people who say they have a mixed marriage. Isn't every marriage a mixed marriage?

Take us, for example. My wife and I started dating secretly while we worked at the same company, and when we outed ourselves no one was particularly surprised. "Dude, she's like a girl version of you," they said. "That makes me look awfully narcissistic," I said. "Please, shut up now."

It's true, we're very alike. We found this out on one of our first dates, when we took the free bus to IKEA just to eat Swedish meatballs and watch planes land across the turnpike at Newark Airport. Alas, despite our mutual love of aeronautics and over-sauced meat, our marriage also constitutes an unholy union between two very different subspecies.

I am a dork. I'm the guy who memorized "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" before he saw it, because my best friend taped it for me off the TV. (Note: He did this by placing a cassette tape recorder in front of his TV's sole speaker. Which was monophonic. That's how old I am.) I can listen to Spike Jones and his City Slickers go "glug-glug" and "oogah" for hours on end. I spend idle moments thinking up words that become different words when you replace one letter with its adjacent letter in the alphabet. (Like "value" and "valve," or "heroes" and "herpes.")

My wife, on the other hand, is a freak, mainly because she likes to watch graphic surgery on the Discovery Health Channel. Recently, she sat transfixed for an hour while doctors very explicitly freed a woman from the clutches of a 200-pound tumor. Bloody organs were especially important to her after 9/11, when she coped by watching endless loops of heart transplants, skin grafts, and extreme surgeries for debilitating birth defects.  She says she derived great comfort from seeing how much humanity has learned to fix itself. (If she'd heard about this show, she might have become totally unglued.)

I know what you're thinking: My god! What's to become of the children! It's a fair point, because we have no idea which way the little frorks will go. If we really wanted to find out, I suppose we could try a few experiments. Maybe we'll give Robert a butter knife and see if he 1) tries to give TwoBert a splenectomy or 2) starts banging on a cowbell and yodeling.

Jung and restless

My wife remembers every dream she has. I know this because earlier in our relationship, back when our mornings didn't begin with the jolt of a 3½-year-old rhino belly-flopping into bed with us, the day's first conversation usually involved some surreal subconscious adventure that she remembered in vivid detail.

Me? I only remember the ones about anxiety and sex.

Remember when the idea of a truly mortifying anxiety nightmare was walking down the high school hallway naked? Or sleeping through your calculus final? Ha. Freudian chump change. Now that I’m a parent, I get to have real whoppers. The most common is the one when Robert runs into the subway without me just as the doors close, and it whisks him away, his face a rictus of mute terror. I get that one every couple of months or so.

Two nights ago, I dreamed the family was walking down the street toward our apartment and Robert ran ahead to the door, as he usually does. Just as I was calling out for him to come back, a dark van screeched onto the sidewalk, two burly arms yanked him through the side door, and it roared off. I bolted off after it, and I was gaining ground when a gun appeared from the passenger window and shot me in the chest. My body had just thudded to the ground when I woke up, gasping for breath and groping for a GSW in my sternum. After I restarted my heart I padded into Robert’s room and watched him sleep for about 10 minutes.

Then, last night, in a fit of apparent self-regulation, my subconscious sent me a dream that some Weather Channel anchors came over for a Super Bowl party and launched into a passionate orgy in my living room. The sight of all those robotically dull people moaning and writhing and over-emoting, as if every touch was a one-way trip to Pleasure Town, was just a joy to behold.

Even though I've pretty much broken even on the emotional scale, it's still been an eventful couple of nights. I hope after I pass out tonight the REM boys can take the night off.

Watching the unwatchable

I wish I could say that I took the last week off because Not-Blogging is the new black. I wish I had been merely running around to doctor's offices and clothing stores, preparing for Robert's first day of preschool.

But in reality, my wife and I have been transfixed by the gruesome deterioration of New Orleans into New Calcutta. The TV footage is grim. The talking heads are glib and over-earnest. Crackpots ponder whether God sent us Katrina to punish the city for its libertine ways, or to criticize the Jewish pullout from Gaza, or to cripple the American oil industry, or to protest the Britneyspawn.

And that cerebral stalwart Harry Connick Jr. says the violence, rape, starvation, and putrescence that have plagued the Superdome lately "can't be any worse than spending three hours ... watching some of those Saints games we've had in the past."

It's one-stop shopping for the full spectrum of human frailty: from the most weak (whose sickness or poverty trapped them in Katrina's path) to the most powerful (who finally decided to take notice on Day 5, after his poll numbers fell off the table).

It's all so painfully repellent, yet I can't look away.