Laid-Off Dad

What becomes of the secu-ligious?

We've just wrapped up dinner, and my wife and son are inexplicably watching the unbe-LEEV-ably lame tree-lighting at Rockefeller Center. It's a two-hour excrapaganza featuring terrible canned banter and a motley cast of Whoever's In Town This Week, including what looks to be a boyband of opera singers.

At last, the Christmas holiday season that began six weeks ago has officially begun.

The season of buying shit goodwill also highlights another interesting wrinkle in the exquisite tapestry of my marriage: our disparate views of religion. I was raised to worship at the feet of the Big J.C., but it never really took. My wife, though, is a weekly churchgoer who is convinced that when times get tough, God somehow lends a helping hand (or at least a finger). During the layoff, for example, there was this time when we got really low on cash, and my wife was convinced something would break our way. I told her she was crazy and returned to biting my miserable, agnostic nails.

Two days later, I got my first royalty check from a book I wrote before we got married. And oh, the gloating. Am I even close to living that one down? Ha-ha! No.

MIC and I have been debating the relative merits of exposing our children to religion over at the O.P., and I'd be curious to hear your opinions. Anything to draw my attention away from Rod Stewart murdering another American classic.

Living with A.T.S.

Many of you already know that I can make infants burp at will. But is that the Ω of my arcane talentry? As if. The fates have also endowed me with Acute Temporal Sensitivity, whereby I can usually approximate the correct time of day within 15 minutes. It's a little parlor trick I inherited from my dad, and neither of us can explain it. Our best guess is that it's some kind of cosmic reciprocity for our shaggy arm hair, which makes it uncomfortable to wear a watch.

All this is fine and good and amusing until you factor in the nature of my job, which has become so familiar, week in and week out, that every day has a feel. This means I can now tell the day and time at just about any conscious moment. Suddenly, my groove looks more like a rut.

Days off, therefore, are such a welcome shake-up that I was more than happy—ecstatic! enraptured!—to kick back with the boys while my wife went off and pretended to be a human being for a few hours. I ministered to little TwoBert, who over the last week has been fighting a bug so boogery that we have to pry his eyes open after every nap. I also indulged Robert, who is currently on some strange hunger strike that restricts his diet to toast and baby carrots.

Robert deeply resents that TwoBert has gotten most of the attention lately, even though he coughs just as much—and as wetly—as his little brother does. (When they cough in unison, it sounds like an army marching through an icy-crisp snow.) How ironic that Robert's nose would be this far out of joint when it was his nose that brought us this evil virus in the first place.

So I spent the balance of Friday afternoon with my ill and/or ill-mannered little moppets, and the shock to the system worked wonders. For the first time in weeks, time stood still.

Laziness is ...

... getting some cheese from the fridge, reaching blindly into into the dish drainer for a paring knife, sitting down in the living room, realizing that the knife you grabbed is actually a citrus zester, and spending the next half hour zesting Monterey Jack onto your crackers.

An event you won't see at the next X Games

TwoBert's still teething like a mofo, so one of the best ways to distract him from the pain is to play Barber Chair. I lie on my back, he sits on my hands, and I ratchet him upward until I can lock my arms, give him a little swivel, and ratchet him back onto my gut abs. The whole thing makes him cackle--especially when he's at the top and bending over to look down at me.

The fun part for me is playing chicken with the little spit-goobers that fall from his mouth. He's still drooling like Vesuvius, but now he's deep into a raspberry/motorboat phase that ensures that every drop ends up outside his body. So I keep him up there just long enough before the bomb-bay doors open and his little depth charge sidles into place. Have you ever looked up at a sheet of saliva hurtling toward your forehead? It's a total adrenaline rush. For a 40-year-old, anyway.

Colbert, calamari, and thou

The other night my wife and I had a date. I like dates, because I love my wife, with all her brilliance and humor and pale-blue eyes. Dates remind me of the Larky Days, when she and I were just a pair of carefree canoodlers, scampering about the big city and not attending to other people's bowel movements.

The downside, alas, is that time away from the boys costs a boatload, thanks to the sitter and the sitter's dinner and the sitter's cab ride home. (Where do these women live? Schenectady?) So when it came time for my wife and me to step out for some preciously expensive "us" time, I came to a brilliant decision: We would spend it hanging around a grubby television studio.

We went to a filming of The Colbert Report, a tiny, basic-cable sapling among the Redwoods of Late-Night Comedy. I'd met him once at a friend's party, when he was just getting known as part of Exit 57 (and we were still going to parties). He's very gracious and funny, an easy guy to want good things for.

The bad news is that filming a TV show takes a long time, most of which is down time. It's a new show, so it doesn't exactly run like a Swiss watch. At one point, after three acts had been filmed, Colbert and his crew conferred at his desk for about half an hour, presumably debating decisions that should have been made in rehearsal (which had run long). As I sat there, and the time ticked by, and I saw my idea of a fun night out vanishing into the buttcrack of the glum cameraman directly in front of me, I became a little agitated. If my wife hadn't reached down and caressed my white knuckles, I'm sure I would have yelled out something like "Can you get on with this, please? I'm on the clock here!"

This reaction, I think, is in keeping with Dennis Miller's assessment of men, who "can look at a beautiful sunset and think, 'You know, I betcha my accountant is boning me up the ass.' " Except I was looking at a Teamster's ass.

Afterward, we had a quick meal at one of our favorite local places, and we laughed and talked about stuff we used to talk about, back when I had her all to myself. It was refreshing and fun, and worth every penny, almost.

Let the word go forth from this time and place ...

... to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, who can place magnetic letters on a file cabinet, form actual English words, and use these words to craft a grammatically correct sentence.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that in this sentence the subject and verb shall agree, that the prepositional phrase shall be descriptive and aptly placed, and that the overall construction shall be a statement of fact, verifiable by all and sundry.

Let the record thus show that, on November the twelfth, in the year of our Lord two thousand and aught-five, the first sentence my elder son ever sounded out and read, all by himself, was: ROBERT POOPS IN THE TOILET.

Who's watching whom?

By all rights the Slingbox, which takes your cable or satellite television signal and sends it via the Internet to your PC, is pretty cool. Basically, you can watch the TV in your living room from anywhere in the world, as long as you have web access strong enough to sustain streaming video. Anyone who follows tech trends could probably chalk this up as inevitable, because TV signals are stalking us. They're in your iPod, your PDA, your laptop--and soon, the cathode tentacles will reach into your SmartPhone. And that's fine, I suppose. Nothing spices up your commute like having to slalom through a bunch of oblivious twits bouncing off each other and yelling at that stupid woman to stop spinning and guess the friggin' puzzle already.

Predictably, there are more nefarious motives afoot. A colleague of mine with a 9-month-old son has plugged her Slingbox into a hidden webcam in her apartment, and she uses it to spy on her oblivious nanny during the day. I'm still forming my overall view of this. Lawyer friends tell me it's perfectly legal in New York state, but the whole business still gives me the creeps. Questions abound:

• Does your nanny give up her right to personal privacy when you entrust your child in her care?
• Is it prudent or paranoid to want to keep an eye on the stranger who has free reign in your home for ten hours a day?
• Does your relationship with your nanny change if you see her naked?
• Why the hell was she walking around naked in the first place?
• Is she some sort of exhibitionist?
• Why doesn't this webcam have a better zoom lens?

And most importantly: If you're a working parent and you can pick up one of these gizmos for around $250, do you want one?

And it's pronounced "Gojira," dumbass

These are the salad days. When a raw and wet October gives way to a brilliant autumnal crispness, perfect for weekend jags on the hog (which will hereinafter be referred to as "hogjags"). When a voter-fatigued city can look forward to Election Day, and the end of all the pointless electioneering for a mayoral race that might make Reagan/Mondale look competitive. And when a child can respond to the umpteenth stranger's compliment on his Godzilla costume (which his genius mother made for him) by saying "No, dammit, I'm a dinosaur!"

On Monday the four of us went to a local Halloween pageant, during which Robert enjoyed the following loop of activities:

1. Stand in line for 10 minutes.
2. Enjoy moderate success at a game of skill or chance.
3. Receive a cubic foot of motley sugarstuffs.
4. Pitch a little woo (pictured).
5. Repeat until woozy.

Foolishly, Robert entrusted us with his stash, from which my wife and I immediately extracted our 10% tariff. He's since forgotten all about it, so that tariff is now at around 60%. And climbing.

This gut-wrenching emotional trauma is brought to you by ...

Over the last several months I've received offers of free stuff in exchange for an online review. Most of it is useless toy crap that I just don't have room for, so I've declined. But then El Goo came calling with an offer of organic cotton and wool clothes, just as summer was giving way to a cold and rainy autumn. (Top-shelf shrewdness, that.) So I took delivery of a footless cotton sleeper, which TwoBert wore throughout his recent bout with croup.

The sleeper is predictably warm and soft, and it has proved hardy enough to withstand many trips through the washing machine. My only complaint is that the sleeper closes with buttons, which are difficult to connect while little legs are flailing. The buttons also end at the crotch; if they worked their way down one of his legs, diaper changes would be a lot less like stuffing a live chicken into a pillow case.

So thanks, El Goo, and Godspeed against the Hanna Andersson juggernaut. If a good product needs a little extra publicity, I might be able to help. (You hear that, Phil and/or Ted?)