Laid-Off Dad

Terms of interment

There are myriad reasons why I haven't sat down to write in 10 days. Mostly I've spent a lot time navigating by snorkel, buried by the vast and sundry. Buried by work, natch. But also buried by Stephen Colbert, who appeared as Stephen Colbert (instead of Stephen Colbert) at a book signing. Buried by Michael Chabon's book, by R.E.M.'s new live DVD. By autumn leaves that have finally started to fall. By little legs who want to ride the daddyhorse, and by slightly bigger legs who fear being replaced by the little legs and therefore treat Daddy's back as the Mountain of Filial Supremacy.

Especially buried by those pesky baseball playoff games, which beat the crap out of my sleep schedule and after Sunday's win left me hoarse, beer-soaked, and delirious.

So I was buried. But as I thought when I woke up Monday morning and wiped the ginger ale and ketchup off my glasses, it was a good kind of buried.

The good news is I'm rested, I'm relaxed, and I'm rarin' to blop. Who's with me? Can a fella get a what-what?

Food, thought, and Transcendentalism

This week, I am rockin' the Single Working Parenthood big time, as my wife is out of town for work until Friday. This means I am in charge of the Byzantine business of making sure my son is fully prepared for school in the morning. I have received detailed instructions about lunches and snacks and water bottles and home/school folders and myriad other bits of hooey, and our sitter has very graciously agreed to arrive here an hour earlier than usual so that I can entertain the idea of getting to work on time. And now, as I contemplate the notion of feeding, dressing, and preparing all three of us for the day before 7:30am, I figure it's best to stay up until three the night before, just to make sure the experience is a complete clusterfrig.

We went out for sushi tonight, as the three of us do when we're on our own, and I'm going on record here to say that you can tell a lot about a person's worldview by examining how they eat an avocado roll. Robert is a nibbler; he peels the roll open, munches the guts, and leaves a pile of forlorn little nori rectangles on his plate. It appears, then, that Robert wants to live deep, suck the marrow out of life, and go live in the woods for a while.

TwoBert, on the other hand, is a chugger who would cram all six pieces in his mouth at once if I let him. So his future might be a bit more Dionysian. TwoBert's favorite food is What You're Eating, and he feels completely justified in taking what he wants off of other people's plates. I'm looking forward to when he outgrows this phase, and I think he took a large stride in that direction when he stole a wad of wasabi off my plate and then frantically grabbed my sleeve and shrieked, "Daddy I don't like it!" You can imagine my conflicting emotions as I helped him put out the fire.

Unfortunately, there are too many parents who are being denied the privilege of watching their children stuff and/or contort their faces at the dinner table. So I've gone orange, to support the Food Bank of NYC. (The banner is a leftover -- ha! another food reference! -- from when we saw those gates in Central Park.) Please do what you can, so that more daddies can make sure that the snack goes in the brown bag and the sandwich goes in the big container but not next to the fruit leather because that's where the carrots go and please no I hate raisins and don't cut the apple because I like to bite it and I want my blue water bottle because it goes with my lunch box and holy smokes I should go to bed right now.

Scaling back the Schadenfreude

It's just so easy to hate the New York Yankees.

Less so than before, naturally. When I was a kid my hatred was cartoonish and resolute. I hated the Yankees more than Bob and Jeff combined. The Yankees were awful and arrogant and they stunk and, what's worse, they won all the time.

Now, I have to admit some of them aren't all that objectionable. I mean, what's not to like about a class act like Torre? And Posada, whose kid survived cranial synostosis? And Mussina, who likes crossword puzzles? And Rivera, who's been the best ever forever? And all the kids who breathed such an important life into the team's comeback this year?

Regardless, the Yankees remain at the apogee of pure suckage.

Drinking legally for more than half my life

I showed an uncharacteristic bit of momentum with those last two posts. Not sure why. Maybe my blood sugar spiked. Or I was just so flabbergasted by the neighbors, whom aliens have clearly kidnapped and replaced with even-keeled replicas. I've taken a bit of a respite since then, mostly because of my pedal-to-the-metal, fire-till-it-clicks, dig-in-the-fangs-and-suck-out- the-marrow type of lifestyle. But also because lots of stuff happened, and whatever free time I had was spent in Absorb Mode (Mr. Show DVDs, acrostic puzzles, Chabon's marvelous new novel). I'm getting ready for more blogtastic blogorrhea, though, because Eden has announced she's helping the world blop its way through November. The experience was so revelatory and fun last year that I have to see if I can pull it off again. Yes, I have climbed Everest. And now it's time to go back and see if all the frozen poop I left is still up there, among all the other piles of frozen poop.

Last week was yet another Week That Was, with the added pleasure of my 42nd birthday. And I'd like to tell you what happened that day, because I will not forget it ever.

It began with a 5:30am alarm, because a bunch of us at work went to Newark to work for Habitat for Humanity. If you've never done this before, I recommend it. Because these houses are pretty impressive. The one we worked on had three stories and some 2,200 square feet, plus a garage. A veritable palace, compared to my own little Manhattan Habitrail.

After a very sweaty morning in 90-degree heat, one of my colleagues suddenly felt very light-headed. Within ten minutes she was on her back in the HforH office, slipping in and out of responsiveness. I was the man at hand, Salieri to her Amadeus, so I got to ride to the hospital with her and shepherd her through all the initial tests before her mother arrived. In those two hours, at that Newark ER, I saw all sorts of man's inhumanity to man, including a knife wound, a battered child, and a derelict who kept shouting he needed to "make peepee." All of which made me give thanks that my biggest complaint right now is the pod people below.

More fun after the jump.