Laid-Off Dad

Stuart little pink houses of the holy cross word association

Blogging has done wonderful things for me. I have a creative outlet that rewards me with instant gratification. I've met (and gotten loaded with) lots of smart, interesting, funny, and generous people. I've reconnected with other people who I thought had floated out of my life forever. I've worked on my writing and reached the point where reading my own work doesn't make me want to pull my face off my head.

I've also landed a few writing gigs. For cash money. That I have lovingly handed over in lump-sum format to Robert's preschool, proud sponsor of the Drop-Of-A-Hat Closing Policy. It closes on Election Day. And the two days after Easter. And the two days before Thanksgiving. Apparently the faculty all have pressing holiday engagements around the world, and they're all traveling by paddle boat.

Sometimes, blogging is the only way to find out whatever the hell my wife is thinking. Seriously. Some nights -- especially on weekends, when we've had a full day of releasing the Kiddie Kilowatts -- we'll have just gotten the little homunculi to bed and be sitting dazed on the couch, staring off dumbly. Suddenly I'll say, "So. I really enjoyed that post of yours on rectal thermometers." And a conversation is born.

I'm very grateful to blogging, but with every light there is also shadow. Every so often you discover something through another blog, and it crawls inside your brain and sets up shop like a squatter in a tenement. The current culprit is Matthew, who thrust the game "Funny Farm" into my life. All you do is think up words or phrases that are associated with one another and follow the threads as they intertwine. It's addictive and maddening. And now, instead of sleeping, I'm sitting here at 2 a.m. trying to think of three words that are somehow linked to "Viagra."

Any ideas? The words are seven, six, and four words long, and forget it because I tried all of the smutty ones.

Corrections

Item: About two weeks ago, LOD mentioned that he was 41 years old. That was not exactly true (and exactly false) until today. LOD regrets the error, which he blames on his compulsion to round upward. He is seeking treatment (for, like, the frillionth time).

Item: LOD has often referred to his son TwoBert as a small male human, but he is actually a rare hybrid species of oranguferret. The child is charismatic, long-haired, and grabby, but if he is the slightest bit frustrated he will bite and hang onto the nearest toddler as if his life depended on it. LOD regrets the error, and regrets further the need to watch over his carnivorous hellspawn at the playground like a hawk, lest the boy send a small child to the ER in need of a prosthetic elbow.

Item: LOD recently said he was finished reading When Gender Matters, when he meant to say that he was finished with reading When Gender Matters. The book offered some interesting scientific analysis of brain development in boys and girls, but when the author began veering into gross overgeneralization (in order to beat readers repeatedly over the head with the same point* he made in chapter 1), LOD left the book on the subway. LOD does not regret this error.

[* Boys and girls are different. Got it.]

Item: When LOD perused the results of the survey his readers very graciously filled out this summer, he noticed that 83.2% of his readers are female and 14.1% are male. LOD thought there was some sort of math glitch, but he has since learned that 2.7% of his readers are asexual, freshwater sponges (including loyal reader Scott McClellan). LOD is astounded by the error, and by the insensitivity of his advertising underlords.

That's edutainment!

If you're like me (and frankly, the world would be a lot better off if you were), it bothers you when stuff in comic books (and movie treatments thereof) does not subscribe to the basic physical realm. Even little stuff, like when Peter Parker first learns he can scale walls because little filaments are growing out of his fingertips. That's fine, you think, but why can he still do it when he's wearing gloves and boots?

At any rate, if YouTube existed in 1975, there's a very good chance I would have wanted to be this man when I grew up:

There are three other snippets related to this one that are equally amusucational, and you can read a bit more about him here. He is also author of this book, which just jumped to the top of my "to read" list.

With luck, we'll all one day look askance when Superman moves the Empire State Building across the street.

[via MNspeak.]

News you can (possibly) use

Some people categorize this blog as pointless piffle about a polyprogenic pinhead. Others agree. And yet, every blue moon or so, I manage to put aside the high jinks and provide you with some extremely valuable News You Can Use. This installment involves mostly the physicality of maleness.

Item One: The book I just finished, Why Gender Matters, is rife with insights about the physical differences of developing brains in boys and girls. Early on, for example, Dr. Sax asserts that hearing develops much sooner and to a much greater degree in girls than in boys. Therefore, in his view, many of the boys that are diagnosed with ADHD only seem bored in class because they can't hear what's going on.

This might explain why TwoBert hits me in the grapes seconds after I specifically ask him not to; it also sheds light on the following chart, which breaks down the most common ways in which I use Robert's name to address him:

Item Two: The Economist recently related a study suggesting that becoming a father enhances the parts of a man's brain that govern "social behavior" and "pair-bonding." Since these parts are probably very tiny, I suppose a few more dendritic spines can be recognized as growth. In my view, though, this brain alteration is a zero-sum game. I do feel more emotionally bonded to my wife and friends since the kids arrived, but my short-term memory, which was never so hot, now makes Dory seem like Horton. It has also reduced me to supporting my theses almost exclusively with references to children's media.

Here's the link, but be warned that 1) those stingy Brits give nothing away for free, and 2) the study is based on work with male marmosets.

And finally: In a piece on sexual cannibalism (which is now archived, unfortunately), The New York Times suggests that when a male praying mantis chooses the mate that will eventually eat him during procreation, he makes a conscious choice to further natural selection. He likes to pick a mate who will digest him efficiently and pass this nutrition onto his children. I had a fun moment picturing how this dynamic might translate to the late-night bar scene, as a couple of guys might size up a woman and speculate on the strength and purity of her stomach enzymes.

Tie it up, toss it out

I bet you read that title and thought, Awesome. Another post about the ever-important quest for Negative Crap Flow^TM. It's true that NCF is up there among my Life's Imperatives, but lately it seems lofty and elusive. My wife and I were never the most hard-core mopsmiths before the kids arrived, but lately we've been burning whatever energy we have just to ward off squalor.

Culprit One is TwoBert, who at 16 months has become a full-fledged Crap Removal Machine. And not in a good way. TwoBert cocks a suspicious eye at storage. He can commonly be seen perched over a drawer or toy bin and meticulously splaying its contents, one by one, wherever there is free floor space. Because things must be out. Where they can be seen. And crushed. By Daddy's stumbling, naked feet.

This is clearly an attempt to exact retribution. "You might make me sleep in this cage, old man, but when I summon you at 3:30am, you shall trip on an ill-placed baby thing. And I shall laugh."

Culprit Two is Robert, who takes an entirely different tack when it comes to blocking foot traffic: the construction site. When he first went nuts for Bob the Builder and This Old House, he began forming his toys into large fences that bisected the living room. Then he discovered twine and Scotch tape, and we found a whole new world of knots and adhesives. Then came the gift he has cherished more than any other: A roll of CAUTION tape from the DIY store. Now these little subdivisions are as lifelike as ever, especially because they're large and annoying and absolutely nothing goes on inside them.

Each night I come home to an entirely new detour de force, and my first job is to unravel hitches and bends and quadruple-underhand-bowlines on a bight that would make Baden-Powell eat his neckerchief. It is quite plausible to me now that Houdini's escapist training involved merely coming home from work and untying shit for two hours.

So friends, if we haven't had you over in a while, it's not your fault. We love you, and we look forward to seeing you soon -- perhaps after we can reclaim the dining table.

If Richard III had a four-year-old

It's been a month since the boys became full-time roommates in the Bert Sanctuary, and I had prepared myself for the worst. We tried putting TwoBert in a Pack-n-Play during Estivus Peripatetica, and he wouldn't have any of it. I was all set to write a post titled "Cribulations" and prattle on about tantrums and mayhem and sippy cups being scraped along the prison bars. But frankly, the transition hasn't been all that cribulating. TwoBert wakes up every so often, but he usually falls back off to sleep rather easily.

Robert likes to fall off, too -- off of his new twin bed. One night he landed with a thud that woke up the whole house -- except him. More power to him, I say. If there's a skill any child should cultivate, it's the ability to sleep through a midnight face-plant.

There is, however, the matter of the current (and hopefully unrelated) hitch in Robert's speech patterns. Every once in a while Robert launches in with a grandiose proclamation, but he's struck with such aphasia that he can't finish his sentence. He's worked so hard to land our attention that he's genuinely taken aback when he finally succeeds.

Now, I'm not one to lay blame on somebody who can't finish a sentence. I do it all the time. But I'm 41 going on 90, and in my day I was something of a weed enthusiast. What's his excuse?

It's also important to note that conversations like the one below usually occur when I'm late for something, or I really have to take a leak, or some other situation when it's really not in my best interest to hang around and wait for the last, ornery syllable to fall.

Robert: I want to go to... uh...
Me: Where?
Robert: Um... I want to go to... uh...
Me: Where would you like to go?
Robert: I want... uh... to go... uh... tooooooo...

At this point, I want very damn desperately to help him fill in his blanks. But I know I'll come off like I'm hectoring him, which can't be a good thing. So to help me bite my tongue, I wander off into my own Mental MadLibs:

Robert: I want to go... tooo...
Me: [The coffee shop? The hardware store? Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding?]
Robert: I want to... go... to...
Me: [Extremes? Great lengths? The dogs? The video tape? The bathroom?]
Robert: I want... to... uh...
Me: [go... to...]
Robert: go... to...
Me: [uh... ]
Robert: uh...
Me: [Lake Michigan? Suriname? The United Arab Emirates? What, child? WHAT?]
Robert: I forget.

Oyf. My kingdom for a direct object.

The two towers

I wasn't planning on writing a 9/11 post. But as bad luck would have it, I was flicking channels tonight and saw so many of the same toothless bromides that our president and the media have been trotting out since the attacks, and it got me all steamed up. Because after five years of grief, anxiety, anger, and fear, all we have is a briefcase full of platitudes and a great big empty where the World Trade Center used to stand.

I know people who lost loved ones when the towers fell, and I'm lucky to have been spared such singular agony. I didn't see anyone plummet to their death, and I didn't have to outrun the collapse or protect my face from the clouds of ash and asbestos. But the trauma and loss still feel very palpable. I really miss the building itself.

When I was a kid I could see the Trade Center from my bedroom window on a clear night, and when my dad took me to the city the WTC was the first place I wanted to go. I used to stand between the towers and stare up at the grandeur of these enormous manmade things converging in the sky. Then we'd go up to the observation deck, and I'd look out west at the curved horizon and into the wilds of New Jersey, trying to pick out my window. The Trade Center was so cool, and so large, and so fucking awesome, and my dad worked there, which was fucking awesome, and if I could live here I'd be fucking awesome, too.

During the decade or so I spent coming here on my own from across the Hudson, the towers were the first thing I saw when I arrived and the last thing I saw before I left. They loomed above the PATH station, casting a huge, comforting shadow that signaled I was here, where I'd always wanted to be.

In February 2001 I got a job 8 blocks from what is now Ground Zero, and the Trade Center dominated the view from my office window. Seven months later we heard the first plane roar past our heads and into the north tower, and we were watching it burn when we spotted the second plane bearing down on the south tower. We all ran down 30 flights of steps and out into the street, and by the time the first tower collapsed I had walked up to St. Vincent's hospital, where dozens of medicos were on standby for the casualties that never came.

For months after that, I watched from my desk as trucks offloaded onto barges the debris that was destined for scrutiny on Staten Island. It was pretty depressing, but it at least helped distract me from the gaping hole in the skyline. It was more than two years before I finally went to visit Ground Zero, with Robert in tow. The looming shadow was gone, replaced by a blazing openness that didn't make any sense. I did manage to take a picture, though, for the time capsule. You know, just in case the new complex ever becomes a reality.

So today I'm frustrated and angry, because despite my best attempts to put this all behind me the anniversaries are somehow getting worse. Two-years-plus have passed since this picture was taken, and the place looks essentially identical now as it did then. Each new year brings nothing but more questions, more politicizing, more ineptitude, more inertia, and less hope of closure for anyone who lost someone (or something) precious that day.

If you have any hopeful thoughts, I'd really like to hear them.

My nemesis, the sweaty backside

I've been trying to write over these last few days, but it hasn't been working out. I have no thinking time, time to sort wheat from chaff, unless I'm in the steam room. And I can't hold any ideas because I can't write anything down. Bullet trains of thought stop at my little dendritic depot, but by the time I get home they've shot off into the distance and are time zones away, serving dinner in the club car.

Then's there's the distraction of my wife, stretching and grunting to her exercise video about five feet from this desk. She's facing the TV, so I see a lot of her keister in skimpy workout pants. This is an especially appealing view, now that the boys are in the Bert Sanctuary and we have been reunited in our marital bed. It's great, but it also feels a little strange, like she's staying over or something. It brings back memories of when we were co-workers dating on the sly and taking great pains not to arrive at the office at the same time. I'd usually arrive after her and have to play it cool when I walked by her desk. "Good morning. It's good to see you again after all those hours away from you, and I can assure you I have no idea what color panties you're wearing."

[Yes, ladies, I called them panties. Because that's what they are.]

Labor Day Weekend was long but mostly relaxing, since I got to celebrate the end of so many weeks as the family bellhop by staying put. (You can go far in this life by counterprogramming the masses. Zig when they zag, baby.) The boys and I mostly hung out at the playground, and it's a whole new ballgame now that 1) Robert can bike like a motherfucker and 2) TwoBert likes to runrunrunrunrun. Parents of two fully acceleratory boys need to develop independent ocular orbits, like those lizards have, to keep tabs on things. The boys' paths rarely intersect; rather, their trajectories usually recall those word problems about trains leaving Chicago and headed in near-opposite directions. You had to use the Law of Sines, and factor in the curvature of the earth, and it was all just a real mess.

Hm. Another train reference. I may be a tad oversexed.

Crikey!

I woke up this morning and almost spit Rice Chex all over my monitor when I read the news that Steve Irwin, the bloke in short pants who liked to wrap deadly snakes around his neck, was killed by a stingray. He was filming a new crocumentary when he swam too close and the ray stuck him in the heart (!) with its 10-inch barb.

I always admired Irwin, not just because he was brave enough to swat crocs in the face and French-kiss komodo dragons, but because he rode his persona as a colossal doofus to international fame and fortune and spent his life doing what he loved. He is an inspiration to anyone who 1) has an unrelenting passion for something and 2) is a complete dork.

He also has two young children, who will be able to hold their heads high and say their father died when he was stabbed by a stingray. In the heart. As opposed to my kids, who at my funeral will probably have to explain that their father cracked his head on the tub after he fell off the toilet.

[UPDATE: Harry shares the love.]