Tag: parenting

The Importance of Routine

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I am quickly learning the importance of routine to — I want to say any creative endeavor, but I will err on the side of not being an overgeneralizing jerkstore and say — this particular project of mine. No matter what I do, it seems I have had and certainly will have good days and […]

This is Why I Don’t Go Out

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Last night I enjoyed a rare opportunity to go see a baseball game.

I love going to Turner Field, driving through the slums and parking in the shadiest of places to watch our overpaid athletes smack a ball around.  No, really, I actually do enjoy watching the games, I just can’t help but be extremely cynical about the sport and the costs and the everything surrounding the game itself.

You might guess that there is more to the ball game than the ball game, if you’ve been reading the blarg here, and you’d guess right.

It’s not a thing that I’m specifically familiar with myself, because it’s not a thing I partake in all that much, but apparently, sometime in the last couple of years, Turner Field has started selling adult beverages with actual hard liquor in them.  Personally, I think this is fantastic, because given the choice between getting gouged for $8 on a lukewarm beer and getting gouged for $10 on a watered-down margarita, I know where my hard-earned money will be wasted — where it will do the most good.  This, naturally, seemed to be the inclination of a good many patrons at last night’s game.

Before I get into the story, let me make the appropriate disclaimers.  I don’t mind drinking in public.  BY ALL MEANS, GO OUT, HAVE A GOOD TIME.  I don’t even mind a bit of intoxication in public, as long as it’s done the right way.   The right way to drink in public includes some of, though not necessarily all, of the following:

1.  A clear, decided-on-beforehand designated driver.  If your group is big enough, you need more than one and you need to know who’s riding with whom so hat there is zero confusion about who is and who is not allowed to imbibe.

2. Cash.  This depends where on the scale you fall between Bill Gates and, oh I don’t know, ME.  And it applies more at venues like sporting events, where stuff is really overpriced, as opposed to restaurants and bars, where it’s only reasonably overpriced.  If you’re paying with cash, then you know when you’ve had all you’re allowed to have.  Credit cards and drunk people do not mix well, unless you are the proprietor of a credit card company, in which case, let me cue up the cash register noises.

3.  A brain.  More specifically, the brains of the operation.  The group needs a leader, and while it could be the DD, it doesn’t have to be — the job of the brain is to assess the situation and LOCK SHARKNADO DOWN when it starts to get out of control.  “Oh, Billy’s had a few too many, let me get him some onion rings and a coke instead of a beer on the next round.”  “Hey, Charlene just bought a round for the table, she doesn’t make that much money, let me steal her wallet so she can’t buy any more drinks.”  “Hey, Ted, help me get Eddie down from the drapes.”

Our companions for the Braves game last night had none of these.  Let me clarify.  I’m calling them companions only because I learned so much about them, not because they were our partners in enjoying this spectacle of athletic prowess.

They were an office group (!) composed of but not limited to, Jerry, the boss, Martez, the gay one, Jenny, the quiet one, and a handful of sundry others whose names I didn’t catch, largely because they were too far away.  Couple of the older members of the group had their kids along for a night at the ballpark.  Nice group.  Innocuous.  Perfectly ordinary.

And then there was Leah.

Leah showed up hammered.  We could tell because she arrived to the group with a shouted, “HEY Y’ALL!  ARE THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder, she bellowed, “I FOUND OUR SEATS.”  Back to her group.  “ARE ALL THESE OUR SEATS?”  Back over her shoulder.  “THE SEATS ARE DOWN HERE, GUYS.”  The caps are necessary because she was speaking in them.  She began to step past the others in the row, stumbling and holding her (first) beer up over her head, sloshing it wantonly about.

As she slid down in front of us, my actual group exchanged glances which spoke of the unending weariness we would surely feel with her before the night was out.

I can’t relate everything she did that was offensive.  There simply isn’t time.  But I did take some notes.  No, really, I did, because I always have a little notepad with me (never know when the Id-Writer will grab the steering wheel), and why not get some material out of an otherwise irritating situation?

 

It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!
It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!

 

I’ll start with the selfies.

Stop foaming at the mouth and put aside your feelings on the subject for the moment.  I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to document your life, and a selfie is an immediate, if a bit artless, way to do that.

However.

Comes a point when you need to turn outward and enjoy the Braves game / the panoramic view / the street riot / your own marriage proposal the way you were meant to experience it, which is to say, through your OWN eyes and in your OWN mind, not through the lens of a camera (sorry, the screen of a phone) and for the benefit of your social media “friends”.  At some point, taking a few pictures of yourself and your friends turns the occasion from “look at this amazing thing we experienced” into “look at how amazing we are, also this thing was happening while we were amazing”.

It’s the Sorites paradox.  You have a single grain of sand, then you add another grain to it.  This is not a heap.  Add another grain, it is still not a heap.  No single addition of a single grain of sand marks the moment when your handful of grains of sand becomes a heap, but suddenly, there before you, sits a heap.  Likewise, no single selfie marks the moment of transition from “amazing thing” to “I’m amazing, and thing”.  But the moment is in there somewhere.  I don’t know what moment it was, but it happened well before the 54th picture Leah took of herself and her friends.  That’s 54 pictures documented; I didn’t count the ones she took during the first inning or, for obvious reasons, when she was away from her seat (which was often, after all, those beers won’t refill themselves).

Then, lewdness.

Let me come back around to what I said about alcohol: in essence, DO YOU, just do it smartly.  Whatever gets your rocks off is between you and whichever Big Daddy you pray to, but some (most?) of it is simply not the business of anybody who is not you, ergo, don’t make it their business.

She spent much of the game sexting.

I know this, not because we were reading her texts over her shoulder (though that happened, eventually, because frankly, the woman was a living, breathing train-wreck we could not look away from) but because this became a topic of much debate among her group.  Her work group, let me remind you.

So she’s hammering away on her phone for much of the game, and somewhere around the 5th inning, Jerry (the “boss” of this group — and presumably, the man she works for, or who at least supervises her in some capacity) gets curious and snatches her phone to see what she’s so engrossed in when there is a perfectly engrossing baseball game happening just a few hundred feet away (oh yeah, we had pretty swell seats).  His eyes and his mouth get wide and he passes the phone back.  Things get quiet for a while.  Then conversation picks up, slowly, the way grumpy siblings start communicating with one another only by saying “he started it,” “no I didn’t,” after the parents have separated the kids.  Leah’s complaining about being judged, about feeling massive judgment.  She’s still drunk, so she’s still loud.

Let’s pause and evaluate.  Jerry’s stone-sober.  He’s the boss, or at least a supervisor.  JERRY SHOULD BE THE BRAINS OF THE OPERATION.  Jerry should have Leah on lockdown.  Truth be told, he should have kept her from drinking anything since the 3rd inning, but by this point, it’s obvious to everybody in section 218 that she’s off her Asgard and needs no further alcohol.  Let’s not forget that in the immediate vicinity are five or six co-workers, a few of whom have children with them.

But instead of locking the sharknado down, he’s commending her on her correspondence with whatever champ is on the other end of her dirty little fingers (ew).  And he gets her another beer when he comes back from the restroom in the 6th.

In the 7th inning, said champ sends her a picture of his, uh, situation.  She passes it around.  We all see it, too.  It’s awesome, in that way of giving us all things to talk and rant about on the drive home.  It’s less awesome, in that I feel strongly that there is a fixed number of, uh, situations that I should look upon in my lifetime, and I just wasted one on this idiot.

There was other bad behavior.  She kept throwing her head back to laugh and smacking the knees of people in my group.  She raised her arms in triumph after “winning” an argument with Martez, only to spill beer backwards on our shoes.  She had to have two hands supporting her to walk down the stairs in the 8th inning.

I occasionally have the thought that I really do stay in too much.  It’s bad enough that I chose a solo activity for exercise (running), a solitary hobby (writing), and I have a kid at home who needs my supervision and my time every moment I can spare them.  It makes me feel like a hermit, a recluse, that guy whose house the kids wander past and say “that weird old guy lives there — I heard if you say his name three times in the dark, he’ll appear behind you in the mirror and tell you to get off his lawn.”

Then I go out and cross paths with a Leah, and suddenly all my decisions seem right.

Seriously.  Friends don’t let friends get drunk and act like a fool in public.  Certainly not at the age of 33.  That was the saddest part.  She is my age.

Toddler Life, Chapter 219

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Living with a toddler is two parts awesome, two parts terrifying, six parts gross, and eight hundred parts blinding, world-shattering panic.  One moment you are giving high-fives to your adult family members as he takes his first steps, the next moment you are spilling lemonade all over yourself in a scrambling frenzy as he legs it across the yard toward the street.

They are incredible little critters, capable in single acts of making you shake your head in amazement, shaking your head in wonderment, shaking your head in disgustment; sometimes all in the same single act.  For example (and this is a 100% true, zero-embellishment story), MERE MOMENTS AGO as I was sitting down to think what I would blarg about tonight, I situated myself with tablet on the armrest of the sofa and keyboard in my lap.  I reached over the arm of the sofa to get a sip of my soda and put my hand in a pool of something slimy.

Let me not bury the lede.  I did not at the time, nor do I now, know what the slimy something was.  I was more or less equal parts appalled and curious (a state of mind I have come to live in as a parent), but this time, at least, discretion got the better of curiosity and I cleaned it up without asking the difficult questions.  I should point out (and I don’t know if it’s a guy thing or a parent thing or a me thing) that whenever I come across these somethings in the house, I *must* sniff them.  For some reason, some tiny but unknowable part of my brain just HAS TO KNOW whether what made the mess is benign (masticated cookie bits, fruit juice, melted chocolate) or Just Another One Of Those Things Which Will Make Us Need To Burn The House Down One Day (cat barf, blood, cat poop, human poop), and as long as the stain in question hasn’t yet dried, what better way to test the content of a smear than by shoving it up under your beak?  This happens more than I would like to admit.

As I said, I somehow stopped myself from smelling this slimy something, but it was green and brown and cold and gross and Extra slimy, so I felt it a safe bet that it was something I didn’t want to smell. I cleaned it up, simultaneously wondering at a number of factors:
1) when did he make this mess?
2) what did he use to make it?
3) how did he make this mess in this spot without either my wife or myself noticing him making it?
All at once I am admiring his stealth and choking back the bile rising in my throat at the touch of this slime on my hand.  So, you know, impressed and horrified at once, that’s parenting.

Anyway.

It’s funny how clever he can be when he wants to be and how dumb he can be when it suits him.  We’ve been trying to teach him colors for over a week now, and he is more than happy to call everything blue.  The sky?  Blue.  The plate of spaghetti?  Blue.  School bus?  Blue.  OR, he will happily hold up a brightly-colored object and ask us, “what color is this?” and when we tell him, he tosses it aside in favor of the next bright color that he can “what-color-is-this” us with.  This game can be played for entire minutes at a time (a minute in baby time is worth a good hour of adult time).

So he either cannot understand, or is willfully refusing to understand, colors, but at the same time, he can make a fully-understandable (and in fact perfectly grammatically correct) sentence to tell us, “No, I don’t want green beans”. “No, I don’t want juice.”  “No, I don’t want night-night.”  All I know is, as Bill Cosby once put it, it takes a lot of intelligence to fake stupidity, and if he can pick and choose what kind of vegetable he would like for dinner, then he can Dondraper sure tell the difference between blue and red, no matter how much he calls them both orange.

Then there’s his motor skills.  Improving, by leaps and bounds in fact, but I still wouldn’t trust him with a ginsu knife, or for that matter a tube of toothpaste.  He can conduct himself across a room in 2.3 seconds, arms and legs flailing like a scarecrow in a hurricane, leaping with outstretched legs up the step into the foyer and sidestepping the cat like he’s Jackie Chan in Drunken Master.  The same child will then, while walking AND holding my hand in a grocery store, trip over his own feet so badly that he sprawls on his face and begins screaming like I’ve taken his favorite plastic dinosaur away.

Yesterday we were watching The Tigger Movie for, oh, I don’t know, the thirtieth time this week (those of you without children, don’t judge — those of you with children know exactly what I’m talking about, you know your kid has THAT ONE MOVIE).  For no apparent reason, without any apparent impetus and certainly without warning, he turns to me with the look of greatest purpose on his tiny, innocent face, and says, with all the gravity and urgency of a bloodstained, cyborg-pummeled Schwarzenegger, “I GO.”  And then gets up and dashes from the room, scarecrow arms and legs flapping madly.

I don’t know what was in his head, and it doesn’t matter.  It was awesome.  Things are so immediate.  There’s no doubt, no hesitation, no waffling over “well, if I do this, somebody might think this…” The cookie looks delicious, I GO.  That juice needs spilling, I GO.  That cat needs it’s tail pulled.  I GO.  Simple words for simple deeds.  There’s an eloquence in that to be striven for.  I’m not sure it’s worth the price of all the poop and vomit, though.

Late Night Write

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Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.

Please Shut Up

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I really wanted to find something I could blarg about this evening.  I really, tried hard.

But I am tapped.

I don’t really know why.  Today was a day at work much like any other day.  I hammered out a pretty solid 1300 words and change.  Felt the flow pretty strongly, too; no piddling around, no aimless wandering to get the juices flowing, just down to work and kept smashing away at it.  Like a rock.  Left myself well poised for tomorrow’s session as well, a trick I’m learning to embrace and enjoy.  But that’s it.  I keep searching for off topic ideas to write about and I’m coming up empty.

Actually, I do have something to say, but it’s a little preachy, so I’m going to keep it brief.

Parents, teach your kids to appreciate the value of silence.  Take some time to teach them that not every fargoing minute of their existence has to be filled with distraction, with music, with jokes, with youtube videos, with gossip, with dancing, with ANYTHING.  There are times for all of those things. Those are good things a lot of the time.  But for god’s sake, let the silence in and enjoy it every now and then.

As a teacher, nay, as a parent, NAY, as a HUMAN BEING, it’s so frustrating to see the scores and scads of children — who are about to become adults! — who, when faced with a few minutes of quiet reading or study time, reach immediately for headphones, or can’t help but whisper (or just flat out talk) to a friend, or drum on their desks, or find ANYTHING TO DO EXCEPT KEEP SILENT AND FOCUS.  I get it.  They’re kids.  School is not the thing they really want to be doing with the day.  That’s okay.  I’m not faulting them for that.  But I think there’s something wrong when you can’t simply let yourself be alone with your thoughts for a little while.  When you can’t just turn off the music, put the goldfinger phone down, and actually listen to somebody else talk for a little while.  I don’t even mean me.  Just listen for a moment to process and consider the thoughts of another human being.

And the talking, ye gods.  They talk at each other and past each other but it’s a rare moment where any of my students will actually say anything to one another.

And yeah, I know, giving voice to these thoughts makes me sound hideously old and tired and get-off-my-lawn-ish.  I can’t help it, and I’m not sure if I want to.  Because if a kid can’t stop and think, how is he any better than an animal?  What’s the point of tens of thousands of years of evolution if we’re going to de-sensitize the one organ that gives us an advantage over every other creature on earth?

Okay, the lament for our future is over for now.  Pardon my soapbox.  I’ll just close the door as you leave and cry inside for a while.