This has been a transformative and testosteronic week. First of all, I finally looked the Devil in the teeth and got a paid Internet connection of my very own. I resisted because, frankly, I fear having nonstop access to all these megabillions of megadata. It's just too easy to slump and be reactive* to things others have created rather than create anything of my own.
* Shit! I'm using the passive tense! It's started already!
The kids, however, are freakin' ecstatic that Daddy finally took the plunge. R is a third-grader now and has homework every night, so his procrastination needs have shot through the roof. And T is over the roof about streaming videos through our Wii, fueling his addiction to Shaun the Sheep.
My latest thing is "Rescue Me," which for the uninitiated is an even blend of "As the World Turns" and a few hundred ram scrotums. It's been in my queue forever, but now that I've instant-streamed a dozen or so episodes I'm ready to jump out of an F-16 while eating a bear.
There's also this, which sums up last weekend's M3 Summit pretty well. As a veteran of three BlogHers, I'm way too inured to swagbags full of moisturizers and support garments. So it was a welcome change to 1) be the non-alternate sex, and 2) drink lots of beer while earnestly discussing whether Michigan could beat Notre Dame.
I went to M3 mostly because I wanted to reverse my tendency to stick within the clatches of people (mostly women) whom I've read and known and liked for years. But I also wanted to meet several men who've never made it to BlogHer and, if this Year of the Dad thing has any traction, might not ever have to:
- I finally bro-hugged with Jason Avant (whose tongue is probably still bright green from all the Red Bull), Danny Evans (who's a lot less meshugenah than his book suggests), and Daddy Scratches (who does).
- The guys at Man of the House and DadLabs, whose work I've admired for a long time, are just excellent company.
- Danny shared an author's panel with Ron Mattocks and John Cave Osborne, each of whom has shrewdly wrung humor among lives that are a helluva lot more complicated than mine.
- Doug Block brought his movie, "The Kids Grow Up," and it blew us away. Also, it seems his daughter is about to graduate school and move back to New York. So he's already working on the sequel, "The Kids Come Back and Raid Your Goddam Fridge."
- Father Muskrat and Jessica Kirkwood (yes! there were babes!) were great hometown hosts.
- I learned a bunch about media savvy and man-marketing from modern media mainstays Dave Taylor, CC Chapman, Paul Banas, and Caleb Gardner.
- And there were a bunch more daddybloggers--such as Dad of Divas and Ben Spark--whom I added to my RSS feed, right before I was told that RSS feeds are obsolete.
If I missed anyone, that's my bad. But dude, I am totally LINKED OUT.
The first of anything is a big step, and I hope the dadblog community can benefit from this new lattice of friendships that we made at M3-2010. After meeting the talents and passions of all these men, I'm feeling pretty optimistic that we can build ourselves into a more cohesive group that can be thought of as more than just "mommybloggers with cranks."
