Tag: funny

That Kind of Morning

Pavowski5 Comments

I usually don’t use the blarg to vent about little things; it’s not my jam to get overly worked up over the ticky tacky stuff that happens to everybody all the time.  Then again, sometimes things happen that just throw you so far off your stride it’s impossible to get past it.  Douglas Adams made a fantastic comparison once (and I’m paraphrasing heavily): It’s as if you’re going along happily in third gear, and feeling how wonderfully powerful you are and how smoothly everything is going, and then as you shift into fourth gear you miss the shift and throw the vehicle into reverse, and your vehicle vomits its engine out onto the highway.  I feel like that was in The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, but I can’t be certain.

There are just some things you take for granted in your day.  Some simple things that are so very simple they cannot fail.  The sky, for example, will hover merrily above your head.  Gravity will tug gently downward at you.  People will generally be decent, if a bit self-absorbed.  Doors will operate by the simple use of their handle.

But you can’t take all of those things for granted.

wpid-20140826_072051.jpg

That’s my driver’s side door, moments after I attempted to open it to go to work this morning.  I took hold of the handle and pulled it toward me in the proscribed manner, and then with a comically loud snap, it broke off in my hand, sending me windmilling wildly backward in my driveway.  (I wish I could have said windmilling wildly westward, but I don’t know if that’s true and it’s a bit aggrandized.)  I can still get it open, but I have to slide a finger behind that tab of remaining handle to lift up the metal bit which lies flush against the back of the handle well, and then get my other fingers under that to open the door.  So it’s about five times as much work as opening a door should be, plus it looks like absolute ass.  And okay, yes, first world problems and all that, but ugh.  Of all the things that can go wrong with a car, you don’t expect the door handle to be anywhere near that list, or in fact on the list at all, or even adjacent to the list.

I’m not one to ascribe significance where there is none.  The breaking of a door handle has no bearing on the rest of my day except for leaving me a little bit in doubt as to whether other taken-for-granted elements in the world will also cease to function as advertised.  Still, this strikes me as pretty odd.  I mean, I didn’t know this could happen through what I can only assume is normal use of the product.

Am I wrong?  Does this happen?  Are we all just in some long invisible queue waiting for the automatic certainties of the universe to decay on us?  Or is all my working out paying off, so much that I now need to be really careful when I handle delicate objects?

Ahem.  So this is Tuesday.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Sprout Shenanigans

Pavowski7 Comments

Of course he’s awake.  I mean, why wouldn’t he be?  It’s only 5:30 in the morning.  The sun won’t be up for another hour.  His baby sister will be awake in about fifteen minutes, but after a light snack, she at least will go back to dreamland for another two hours or so.  But no, he’s awake.  Which means I have to be awake, because today is my day to get up early with the kids.

Make no mistake, the mind of a child is a lot more powerful than we give them credit for.

On some level, he knows that I agreed to get up for the early shift with the kids so that my wife could have one blessed day of sleeping in.  He knows that we had a drink or two last night and got to bed later than usual.  He knows that I want nothing more than to turn off their monitors and let them cry it out until they fall asleep again, or until I wake up of my own accord.  But I won’t do that, because I’m dad.

They work together in ways you couldn’t imagine, these kids of mine.  Sure, Sprout #2 pretends to be completely defenseless and powerless to do anything and completely dependent upon my wife and I (okay, completely dependent on my wife), but I swear she’s communicating with Sprout #1, who is developing a kind of literary and oratory prowess that unnerves me a little.  Just the other day, he was playing with his toys and without any prompting, warning, or cue, turned to my wife and quoted with authority the entirety of page 37 of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: “Would you like them in a car?  // I would not, could not, in a car!”  Confession time, that may not be page 37 of the book, but the quote is verbatim; I know this because I’ve only read it to him about four hundred times.  See, lately, he’s graduated from “want that” and “no beef stew” to actually using nouns and verbs together in the way they are intended, his tiny little stabs at formal language taking shape like so much silly putty being formed into the likeness of a sticky pink Statue of Liberty.

So I know he’s communicating with Sprout #2.  Covertly, of course.  While my wife and I think he’s just babbling incoherence or yelling for the sheer joy of hearing his not-so-tiny-anymore voice reverberate off the crayon-festooned walls, he’s slipping her messages.  I can only guess at what they are, but they are coordinating over the past several days in ways too numerous to ignore.  For example…

They don’t nap at the same time.  Ever.  The most we get is a fifteen-minute overlap, presumably the result of Sprout #1 falling too fast asleep and forgetting to wake up to hold up his end of the deal.

Sprout #1 will basically start crying whenever she stops.  He’ll find something to get upset about, something to want that he can’t have, something he wants to do that we can’t allow, something to fall off of and hurt himself.  When she’s crying or upset, he’s mostly cool, but as soon as she chills, it’s time for him to go to eleven.  Sprout #2, on the other hand, cries whenever I look in her direction, except when Sprout #1 is throwing a fit, then she falls asleep in a way that benefits us none at all.  Unless they decide to both go into full four-alarm screaming tantrums at the same time.  Then all you can do is sit on the couch and press your fingers into your temples until the world fades away.  Of course, then, Sprout #1 will throw a full bag of crayons at your unguarded privates, and then the whole screamy world comes crashing back into your cranium.

They can both go from being absolutely adorable to being nightmares out of a Stephen King novel in the space of about ten seconds.  All it takes for Sprout #1 to turn is tripping over a toy, or being told he can’t have a popsicle, or his daddy taking a little too long to get him loaded into the car to go to the playground.  Sprout #2, as I mentioned before, can turn on me in the space of a second for no reason I can discern.  I think she just likes to see if she can make me cry by crying at me, in a weird sort of reversal of the “let me imitate the face you’re making” game that kids apparently like so much.

They coordinate farts.  This cannot be made up, and I would not dare to embellish.  Just this morning (shortly after they both woke up prior to 6 AM) we were sat on the couch watching PUPPY SHOW (I’ve no idea what the show is called, LeapFrog something I think, but Sprout #1 calls it PUPPY SHOW so PUPPY SHOW it is), when I felt the tiny little burst on my left thigh where Sprout #2 was sitting.  Not a moment later, a somewhat bigger, juicier, louder brap on my right thigh.  Then a series of staccato fut-fut-futs on my left thigh from the newborn.  Then a deeper, gut-rumbling pfffththththth on the right. Then I’m sitting there, holding the two of them, laughing so hard I’m crying as their symphony of gastrointestinal woodwinds blows away in my lap.

And of course, they don’t let us sleep in.  No, she wakes up at 5:30 or 5:45 like clockwork for her early morning snack, and he’s up and kicking by 6:30, just about the time my wife is falling asleep again after providing the snack for the newborn.  But no, when it’s Daddy’s morning to get up early with the babies, they’re both up at 5:15 and there is no falling back to sleep for them or for Daddy until the sun is out and it’s so hot in the house no adult could sleep for fear of suffocating on his own sweat.

I love my children, I really do.  But I think they’re trying to kill me.  Not cold-blooded murder, you understand.  Just the long, slow, inescapable death of gradual exhaustion by degrees.

 

This post is part of SoCS:

http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2314/

The Equal Amateur

Pavowski2 Comments

A Random Title Challenge from Chuck this week.  In keeping with my last several posts, I thought long and hard about how to attack this prompt, and then realized that the right way was literally right under my nose.

Here, then, is The Equal Amateur, a tale of a cold and heartless world where all your efforts and learning and experience don’t mean sharknado next to the bright and talented young upstart.

 

The Equal Amateur

“Son of a bitch,” Nick thinks, casting a subversive eye at the lump of protoplasm squirming in the holding unit at the far end of the cell.  “What’s happening here?”

It’s swatting at imaginary flies now, but that always precedes the screaming.  Sure enough, after just a few moments of flailing its stubby suggestions of arms (they look more like tiny, squishy marshmallows conglomerated on sticks to Nick), the lump begins to wail, a wordless, plaintive cry that somehow seems to permeate his consciousness.  He sets down his brightly colored blue plastic floor-smasher and stares at her.  He almost sighs and shakes his head, but he hasn’t yet learned the significance of such a gesture.  “It’ll never work, kid.  Words.  Words are the future.”

But even as he thinks it, one of the Keepers hops up from the sitting apparatus and hurries — practically sprints — to the lump, scoops it up in loving arms, and begins to babble incoherent speech at it in a tone Nick sort of remembers in his own unfinished cortex.  A tone of soothing, of comforting.  Nick’s mouth hangs open and he stares, astounded, furious, perplexed.  “I’ve got to throw myself on the ground outside — get all that painful red smeary stuff on my parts — to get that kind of attention.  And the lump just has to whine a little bit?”

Time was, Nick reflects, that seniority spoke for something around here.  When he could get the Keepers’ attention with just a cock of his head or an insignificant, purposeless spasm of his fingers.  He’s put in the time learning their language, learning where the food is kept, learning which of the animals can be safely ridden and which scream and yowl when touched.  Now all the Keepers seem concerned with is shoving a variety of foodstuffs under his nose or into his hands, removing the smelly brown goop from his privates when it inexplicably shows up, and making sure he sleeps more than he would particularly care to.  Sure, they laugh and clap when he manages to pronounce some new word in their alien tongue, but their joy is fleeting and quickly forgotten.

Then there’s the lump.  The lump has been in the detention center for only a few days, but has already started throwing her weight around.  For some reason Nick can’t wrap his tiny cranium around, the Keepers respond to every twitch, every whimper, every little thing the lump does with a care and affection and concern he’s not known since he can remember, although to be fair, the rapid expansion of his brain and the constant barrage of new interesting information — new things to ingest, new words to try out, new colored sticks to rub against the walls to mark the period of his imprisonment — doesn’t leave a lot of room for memory and reflection.  Still, it seems unjust.  He’s put in two years with the Keepers, knows their routines, knows how to get a rise out of them, knows how to get them to leave him alone.  Knows that if he ululates at just the right frequency, he can get the male’s eye to twitch, and then he can get anything he can find the word to ask for.  Unfortunately for him, he only knows words like “popsicle” and “string cheese” and has not yet learned the words for “existential fulfillment” or “the sweet relaxing freedom of a nap among the daffodils.”  Knows that if he pretends to be hurt, the female will hug him and squeeze him and tell him that she loves him, and then it’s time to ask for more popsicles.

No, the lump doesn’t even have to ask and they’re showering her with clean dressings.  The lump needs only twitch and they pick her up and bundle her close.  Should the lump begin to cry, they lock down the unit and find a way to make her happy, even going so far as to put her in the Swing.  The thought makes Nick’s blood boil.  He doesn’t fit in the Swing anymore, and they haven’t shown any signs of getting one that fits him.  Funding, probably, or maybe they just don’t care.  He’s tried to sneak into it anyway but the Keepers shout at him and threaten him with solitary confinement: the dreaded “Time Out.”   Much though he loathes them, is frustrated by them, attempts to find ways to skirt their authority, the thought of their separation is more than he can bear. He shudders and bites back the bubble of indignant anger that chokes his throat.

The lump has quieted.  The female Keeper puts her back into the holding unit and returns to her vantage point, failing to acknowledge Nick at all but for glancing in his direction to make sure she doesn’t step on him.  He wistfully holds up a crayon to her, willing her to understand his plaintive desire to tell his story, to connect with another like him, to step outside and taste the freedom and run in circles until his tiny legs can no longer support him.  “That’s a good crayon, Nicky.”  The male keeper is falling asleep at his post.  Typical.

Then it dawns on him.  Maybe it’s not that the Keepers don’t love him anymore.  Maybe the lump is just better adapted for the world than he is, for all his practice.  Equal to him, perhaps, without the cumbersome training.  He watches her with suspicious eyes.  Is there something to learn from her?  Fewer words, more inarticulate screaming?  Less intelligent manipulation of the environment, more flailing and stomping and smashing?  It’s a disquieting thought that all he’s learned can be overthrown by one tiny little infant, but it’s hard to argue with the results.  With dawning terror, he realizes that he has a lot to learn from the lump.

Things Writers Need – Dictionaries

Pavowski4 Comments

In this next installment, it’s time to talk about more tools of the trade.

Last time, of course, I talked about the word processor, and why I like small, minimal ones instead of monolithic, fully-featured ones — for the drafting process, at least. Today, another staple: the dictionary.

Every writer should own a dictionary.  Scratch that — every writer should own a Dictionary, capital letters and italics included and necessary.  There’s a gargantuan difference between a Dictionary and a dictionary, and I’m not just talking about the price point.  Of course, there are alternatives.  To effectively draw a distinction, we need to consider what you’re using a dictionary for. To my mind, there are basically two functions that the dictionary should serve for you.

One, the dictionary needs to let you find and define words that you don’t already know the meaning of.  (Yeah, I just ended a sentence with a preposition.  SOMETIMES IT’S OKAY, OKAY?  Would you rather have read “words whose meaning you don’t already know” or “words of which the meaning you do not know” or the thing I wrote?  YEAH I THOUGHT SO.)  If you’re reading age-appropriate literature, odds are there will be a tasty handful of these little gems sprinkled in there.  Why?  Because variety is the spice of life, and you can only read the word “good” or “fast” or “slow” so many times before you want to pluck your eyes from their sockets and puree them into a gristly soup so that you don’t have to read those boring words any more.  Good writers avoid having their readers puree their eyeballs by using a broad swathe of words so that you don’t get bored to the point where eye-pureeing seems like a good idea.  That means that they will, by necessity, exhaust the canon of “ordinary” words that the average person lives with in his average life and strike out for the far reaches of the unknown, where words have four or five or six syllables (multisyllabical words, oh my!) and the sad fact is that a lot of us just don’t know all those highfalutin’ words well enough to use them in our everyday speech or writing, if at all.  And I say that with full confidence in my vocabulary as an English teacher.  I know my vocabulary sucks.  Sorry, it’s atrocious.

I read once that the English language is composed of something like three hundred thousand adjectives, which is more than 850% of the total words in the language.  Statistics are always true.  The point is there are more words in the language than you have room in your brain for, and a good storyteller will push your limits by throwing some of those words in there.  Sure, you can figure them out on context a lot of the time, but isn’t it satisfying to look up a fancy word so that you know it and can then toss it offhandedly into your water cooler conversation like a foppy prince tossing a bag of change at a servant?  “That episode of The Walking Dead was so guttaperchic, man.  I mean, positively seminiferous.”  See, if you knew those words, you’d know that at least one of those statements is absolute nonsense. The other reason (and it flows from the first, really) you need a solid Dictionary is to help you discover new words to use in your own writing.  Think of it this way.  Electricians have tools.  Carpenters have tools.  Missile building geniuses have tools (right John?).  Hell, even a Comcast Service Technician has a truck full of tools.  What do all those tools do?  Well, unless you have a lifetime of experience running wires or building vestibules or being a totally worthless appendage of a company best likened to the Sarlaac — sorry, a Comcast Service Technician — you don’t know!  Sure, you can guess that the clippy-looking-thingy might be used to, I dunno, cut things, or that the pointy-bit-on-the-end-of-a-steel-doodad could be used to poke holes in things, but when it comes to poking the proper holes in the proper things in the proper place, you’re as educated as a Comcast Service Technician.  (Truthfully, CST’s I’ve had experience with have all been pretty decent human beings, even if they work for the most unholy corporation in the known universe, a corporation that now apparently has religious freedom, so HAVE FUN WORSHIPPING THE BLACK MAW.  Thanks, Supreme Court!)

Ahem.  Writers have a job just like carpenters and electricians and rocket scientists and… no, we’ll leave the Comcast Service Techs out of this one.  Unlike those, you know, technically-abled sorts, we don’t have trucks or toolboxes or closets to keep our tools in, because our only tools are words.  A good, solid dictionary is the best tool repository you can hope for, and on a per-word basis, even an expensive dictionary is the equivalent of getting a 5,000-piece drill-bit and screwdriver-attachment set for $19.99.  You wouldn’t set out to build an addition onto your house with just a manual screwdriver and a hammer. All that said, let’s look at your options.

Online Resources.  Here’s your web-based dictionaries, i.e., Merriam-webster.com, dictionary.com, or whatever website floats your boat.  And don’t get me wrong, these are AWESOME, but they come up short in that “discoverability” factor in the same way that Amazon doesn’t quite measure up to a good old fashioned bookstore with actual walls and shelves and books and snooty clerks.  With an online dictionary, you can only find the words that you’re looking for.  Now, that’s a great feature — albeit one you can accomplish with an old-fashioned dictionary in the absence of a working internet connection, and for those write-at-the-edge-of-society-so-as-to-commune-with-nature types, that’s a monstrous plus.  Sure, these sites will highlight words from time to time and post “words of the day” and other fun stuff, and again, those are GREAT.  But you miss the tactile feel and sense of wandering among corridors and pages of words that a hard copy brings. By the way, just for poops, I scrolled down on the Merriam-Webster site and found a list of the top 10 most searched words in the last week.  They are:

  1. bestiality
  2. bigot
  3. pedantic
  4. et al
  5. biweekly
  6. comradery
  7. holistic
  8. sex
  9. culture
  10. closed-minded

And I think that says JUST A LITTLE BIT about the insane perverted prudish idiotic political culture that we live in.

Cheap, dollar-store dictionaries and pocket dictionaries.  This is a step backwards from online resources, because there is not nearly enough depth or breadth in these.  I saw one in a dollar store once that was literally one hundred pages long.  That was boasted on its cover.  How many words can you cover in one hundred pages?  Not enough.  The really tasty words just aren’t going to be in there, and even the definitions are condensed and crap, like a microwave dinner.  These are useful until about the time you finish high school, assuming you’re not particularly interested in expanding your horizons beyond high school.

Abridged dictionaries.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  If a dollar-store dictionary is a microwave dinner, an abridged edition is a meal-in-a-box.  You don’t feel as dirty using it as you would if you just tossed your food — THE FOOD THAT YOU EAT TO SUSTAIN YOUR LIFE — in the microwave for its entire cooking process, but you know in your heart that you can do better than boiling water to dump the noodles in or preheating the oven to 350 and then cooking for an hour.  The definitions are better and you get a lot more depth and breadth and you start seeing some of those juicy words, but you’re still only dredging the shallows.

Dictionaries.  Here I’m talking about books that might be better classified as bricks.  This book is probably hardcover, because a paperback won’t stand up to being cracked open and laid bare along its spine the way a hardback will, not to mention that there are SO MANY PAGES a paperback wouldn’t even support them.  This is a book whose presence on your shelf demands notice, like an elbowy mafia fatman squirreling for space in an elevator.  It uses that ultra-thin paper like bibles use because the printing costs would be astronomical if it used standard paper; that paper that feels like it would dissolve in direct sunlight, that paper that makes you feel like you need the steady hands you developed from years of playing Operation just to turn the pages without crinkling them.  And ooh, that smell.  Smells like knowledge.  Crack this book open and you can just taste that delicious aroma of every word that’s ever been thought of crashing through your olfactory nerve and wrecking your frontal cortex with the pungent stank of knowledge.  Thumb through the book, put your finger down on any random page and discover words like isogamete and nasturtium and teetotalism (which actually means the OPPOSITE of what I thought it means, in fact I didn’t even think teetotal was a word until just now, I always thought it was “T-total”, like “capital T Total”, in other words COMPLETELY MOTHERTRUCKING TOTAL, but it DOESN’T.  The more you know!).  Add them to your daily lexicon and impress your friends (or, more likely, earn yourself a few raised eyebrows and punches in the mouth).

I’m not making any secret what my preference is.  At the moment I’m flipping through the weathered pages of a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a book bound in beautiful royal blue and weighing in like a bowling ball.  This book could classify as a home defense system if you could get a good swing with it.  And it’s not even a “big” dictionary.  To my mind, if you’re writing in any arena beyond high school, you owe it to yourself to have a hefty hardbacked capital-D Dictionary handy.  One that’s heavy with wordstuffs, so heavy you need a packmule to carry it around.  Thumb through it from time to time.  Make it into a drinking game — one shot for every word that features a schwa.  But more importantly, use it to GROW YOUR LANGUAGE-FU.

What else do writers need?  What else do people think writers need?  Am I wrong about dictionaries?  Let me hear it.

Aaaand I’m Sterile (Seriously)

Pavowski7 Comments

It’s been four days, and I can take the icepacks off my crotch.

Okay, I’ve had the icepacks off since the second day, but that certainly doesn’t have the same ring.

As Bill Cosby once put it, “My wife and I have five children.  And the reason why we have five children is because we do not want six.”  My wife and I have two children.  And I am happy to say that there will not be any more additions to the line, from my wife’s and my branch at any rate.

That is to say, at 4 PM this past Thursday, I got the chop.  Vasectomy.  Snip snip and my days of fathering kids are irrevocably done.  My wife asked me several times in the days leading up to the, uh, event, if I was nervous about it.  I was, but only in the sense of this being a permanent modification to the only body I will ever have.  I don’t have tattoos, I don’t have any piercings (well, one in the ear which almost certainly shouldn’t count), I don’t have any metal hips or plastic fingers or anything.  I am strictly factory-issue.  Until now.

Not that I have convictions about marring your own sacred temple or anything.  You get one body, you get one life, do with it what you please.  Tattoo the Mona Lisa on your butt if you want to, or better yet, a space unicorn leaping through a ring of fire around your belly button.  Spike holes the size of tree trunks through your earholes.  The only consequences you’ll have are the funny looks you’ll garner, and in the case of your tree-trunk earrings, probably some chronic neck and back pain.  (What?  I’m over thirty now, this is the stuff I think about.)

It’s a strange feeling.  In biological terms you could make the argument that I no longer qualify as a male.  Certainly there’s a gravity to the fact that, after twelve or so weeks when they can flush out all the cobwebs, I won’t father any more children.  That’s heavy sharknado, man.  A harsh toke.  But it’s also an incredibly calming sensation.  You hear about those couples in their late 30’s, 40’s, hell, even their 50’s who all of a sudden “had a surprise” and bango, they’ve got another sprout running around.  There’s comfort in knowing that won’t be my wife and I.  We’ve had the talk dozens of times about whether or not we want any more kids, and now, having the two, the decision became very, very easy indeed.

What I found humorous about the entire operation (haw, haw) was just how much of a big deal it wasn’t.  When baby was a couple of weeks old, I made an appointment for a consult, which could not have been more of a formality.  Medical history, list of medications I’m taking or allergies I have, and I was scheduled.  They wanted to take a urine sample but, because I’d foolishly gone in the hall right outside the doctor’s office, I couldn’t, and they said it was “no big deal.”  No big deal!  I’m only about to sever my manly bits and thwart my biological imperative.  No big deal.

Then, the day of the event.  In the first place, it’s outpatient surgery, which is a fancy way of saying you don’t go to a hospital and they kick you the fargo out after it’s done.  In fact, my operation (it feels silly to even call it that) was completed on the same exam table I was evaluated on during my consult.  This was a shocker to me given my experiences with hospitals lately (two c-section births for my kids and my wife to go through, one extended stay in hospital for sprout the first immediately following his birth… the concept of an operation that doesn’t require a lengthy ensconcement in hospital is not one that I really understood.  Nonetheless, I arrived for my appointment at 3:45 and was whisked into the exam room and prepped for surgery, and I was on my way home by 4:30.  I was even able to drive myself home.

I won’t go into extreme detail on the operation for the sake of any squeamish men who may be reading, but I will describe it a little for the sake of being thorough.  First of all, about the only direction I was given as far as preparation was to “shave the area”, which was a quarter-sized patch on the front of the… can I say sack?  Let’s say sack.  If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, you’re probably familiar with the episode where Jerry shaves his chest by accident: he set out to correct an irregularity, then he had to even it out, then he realized he had made things worse, and before he knew what was what, his entire torso was shaved and he was howling at the moon, scratching his feeble growth.  This was not unlike that.  I ended up clearing “the area” and a good swath all around.  Doing this in the summer is not something I advise outside of necessity.  The one word that comes to mind is “sticky.”

Anyway, I go in and strip and sit on the table under a paper sheet (not even a gown, remember, I’m not in a hospital) and the nurse comes in to prep me, which involves making small talk about Georgia Tech and slathering brown antiseptic gunk all over my privates.  The doc comes in, gives me the last chance to chicken out, and advises me to lay back.  I have the option to lean forward and watch or lean back and stare at the ceiling.  I chose the latter, because I’d rather not vomit all over myself.

Quick little stab as the lidocaine goes in, and then I feel some pushing and pulling and working but no real sensation.  If you’ve never been under the effects of lidocaine, it’s a bit like being poked and prodded through four or five pairs of socks.  Then, another stick, deeper inside this time, and a spike of cold fire zips all the way down to the, uh, boys, and that’s the last thing I really feel until the cutting.  Well, I think it was the cutting.  Guys, if you’ve ever jumped into the car too fast and sat on your business, that’s the closest thing I can liken it to, except that it was a slow sensation to set in.  Kind of like it was being stepped on, deliberately and slowly.  Then the same thing on the other side, and then they started to mop up.

The business of it was over in about five minutes, which I distinctly remember because it was so freaking fast it almost defied belief.  The actual sensation that I remember most is suppressing my laughter as the doctor stitched me up — he had literal needle and thread and was sewing my, uh, business, up with these comically overstated strokes of the needle, like some lunatic maestro conducting an imaginary orchestra in my pants.  (Okay, I wasn’t wearing pants, but could you… just… come on.)  Nothing but tugging and the swooping of the needle, a tug and a swoop, and I’m biting my lip to keep from cracking up.

And that was that.  I spent the rest of the night with a pack of frozen peas on my crotch, and I spent the next day in the pleasant dizzy haze that only prescription pain meds can legally provide.  Sunday I was off the meds completely and had a little workout late in the day, today I had my first run since the operation and am having no ill effects.  Oh, my entire sack turned black from bruising but that’s fading and apparently totally normal; no extra pain associated with it.  The only lasting effect I have from the operation is a tiny, half-inch seam on my business, and even that will fade within about a week.

Okay, so this post was maybe a little graphic and probably more than you cared to know about my man parts, but I wanted to write it for a couple of reasons.

  1. This blarg is a chronicle not just of my writing experience but of key moments in my life, and this is most certainly that.
  2. I honestly want to encourage guys who are thinking about this to have it done.  If you’re afraid of the pain or discomfort, you shouldn’t be.  A weekend spent with a little unpleasantness in your area is far, FAR more preferable than a lifetime with extra kids you didn’t expect.
  3. To go further in that vein, compared to a female sterilization, a vasectomy is far less invasive, and has a far shorter recovery time.  The ladies have to go through childbirth and living in a man’s world after all — this is a tiny bullet you can take for your wife (and your relationship).

I may write an update in a few weeks when I’m fully recovered (I still have to be very careful if sprout wants to jump on my lap for example), but I don’t know that that’s necessary.  The surgery really was minor enough that in retrospect it hardly merits as much as I’ve written.  It really is a tiny, tiny thing even though it has huge repercussions.