2012: The Year We Make... Stuff Up

Well, as you may or may not have already observed, we're all still here, living and breathing. Even waiting a couple weeks to factor in some rounding errors that might have skewed things a bit, the world seems much the same as it was not that long ago, and it seems safe to say that the world stands as much chance of ending as it ever does, just like we found out after hitting the year 2000 without planes falling from the sky.*

Are we all that hard up for some real, guilt-free drama and plain-dealing in our lives?

Yes, yes we are.

Sometimes it feels like we've peaked, at least here in the "First World", and the only productive way to go is sideways, to something more elemental, and beautiful... a place and time where all these idle things we've created don't really matter, all the filters we've built between ourselves as humans dissipate. A place where the person shuffling imaginary sums of money from one place to another finds the bulk of her life's experience suddenly useless, and the man with the hand-dug fallout shelter, fully stocked armory**, and decades-long supply of canned food is king.

But then the movie ends, we walk out with our heads down, and we forget all about that nonsense while scrolling through Tumblr pages for updates on our favorite memes, or while monitoring comments on our pictures of food we were about to eat at some point.

But hey, sometimes it just takes a minute to shake out the cobwebs and remember what's really important, right? Here and now, or there and then, and family, and not... stuff... or whatever somebody else reposted on Facebook once that sounded really deep 'n' shit.

Here's to another new year of more of the same! But moreso!

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* Good thing, too, because I was on one that day, off to meet my future wife for the first time. We'll never beat those plane fares!

** To finally get a chance to protect his toothless, malnourished children with the finest matériel tens of thousands of dollars can buy!

A conversation between M- and D-: You gotta watch out for those zombie ground squirrels

The following is part of a Monty-Python-esque conversation my 6-year-old son D- and 3-year-old daughter M- had today with their noses pressed against the patio doors, watching the frolicking of the new litter born to our thirteen-lined ground squirrel friends "Nibble Purple" and "Sunflower Stripehead".*

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking my wife aloud if a little thing near them in the grass was a dead sibling. The flies shortly confirmed this suspicion, and the kids then became intensely focused on this one instead of all the unbearably cute and very alive ones.

M- (trying desperately to find it): Is that the dead one?

D- (patiently): No, it's the one that's not moving.

M-: Is that one it? ...No, it's moving. ...Is that one it? No, it's moving, too.

D- (authoritatively): All the ones that are moving are dead.

M- (buying it, but just trying to make sure she has it straight): All the ones that are moving are dead?

D- (as if she misheard him): No, all the ones that are moving are NOT dead-- they're alive. All the ones that are NOT moving are dead.

M-: Oh.

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* Guess who named them.

Please leave a message after the blerrrghhhh...

If you're reading this post, it's because I got back way too late from sheer, terrifying social overload at BlogHer parties, and you'll hear any funny stories from said wonderful time at some point in the far distant future (based on my track record for timeliness of reportage).

Disclaimer For Everyone At BlogHer, And Also Anyone Who Might Ever Meet Me In Person: I swear that as quiet and sweaty as I may have looked, I really, really was having fun. Really. That's just how I am. Sorry for any confusion or unnecessary awkwardness on your part.

To people reading this who don't know, or wish they didn't know, what I'm talking about, sorry again. I might have made myself a liar already.

I think I've broken my kid

Aren't preschool kids supposed to be pretty imaginative, or at least relatively uncritical of the unknown world around them? Aren't they supposed to sit, slack-jawed, in an awestruck stupor whenever you turn on the TV?

My kids in particular are pretty deprived of television, other than watching I'd-guess-almost-weekly age-appropriate movies and playing the very occasional videogame, but here are just two revealing tidbits I heard from my 5-year-old son while we all endured a really quite awful* Winnie-the-Pooh movie recently:

"They shouldn't have put that in the movie... they should have cut it."

I let the kid watch deleted scenes on a DVD one time and now he thinks he's Martin Scorsese.

"Why do they keep singing songs??"

In his defense, the songs in this movie were undeniably painful, and completely unnecessary to boot. It really was like they had the movie finished, found it was too short, decided "kids' movies have songs, right?", and then went back to add some more scenes where everyone puts their stuff down and starts tunelessly singing some vaguely related song they all just made up on the spot.

And by the latter "they", I mean actual talking stuffed animals with cotton for brains. And redundant inner ear problems blocking their sense of rhythm or timing.

So, I guess this is my way of saying two things. One, my children have absolutely no sense of magical awe or wonder at this world around them, thereby ruining them for religion or even normal human development, and two, Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin is an unbelievably godawful movie.

Just stick with Pixar. Or, if necessary, smash your TV with a baseball bat and tell your kids that the spirit of Walt Disney briefly possessed you and sought both to save them from the horror his company has become and to punish them for asking to watch this movie. The End.

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* When I say "really quite awful", it's my way of being charitable, as my mom would call it. I do that only because when it's convenient to me, I declare that this is a family blog.

But down here in the footnotes? Oh, anything's fair game. It's kids that have trouble reading fine print, right? Anyway, doesn't matter.

This movie is so bad from top to bottom, start to finish, conception to execution, that I would only be mildly disconcerted to personally witness A.A. Milne himself rise from the dead to formally submit the notarized paperwork to have his name disassociated from the movie.**

** And adult-sized Pooh-related costumes. And Pooh underwear, cause that's just really confusing terminology for parents of toddlers.

No, Babe won't give you herpes

Consider this post an early Mother's Day present for my mom, who for the past two weeks has been ranting about how inane the swine flu hysteria is almost as fiercely as I do about random things like the suddenly high percentage of crossword puzzle clues relating to rap/hip-hop in the Tribune lately.*

I've endured this "swine flu" nonsense for about as long as I can take, and while I usually steadfastly ignore fads that try to compel me to acknowledge them with at least outrage or satire, I just couldn't resist after reading this article:

Flu fears alter life at U.S. universities

No, the take-home lesson of this article is NOT how easily life can be drastically thrown off its axis by overhyped paranoia spread by 24-hour news outlets,** but rather how little a college degree is apparently worth in America today.

To celebrate the latest inductees into the elite club that is the enormous percentage of our extremely populous country that has graduated from college, the wizened elders of the prestigious Northeastern University scrambled to make sure there were sufficient quantities of anti-bacterial lotion on hand at the graduation ceremony Friday to combat the (excruciatingly inefficient, it seems) killer virus that has so many people helpfully pitching their pork chops into the trash heap these days.***

Neighbor dogs have never eaten so well! And they won't again until the killer bacteria, perfected by the hyperactive evolution chamber that is our modern "anti-bacterial" society, finally emerges to leave us all as main courses in the Gutter Buffet our dogs will treasure until the germ can tweak itself enough to take them out, too.

Happy Wednesday!!

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* I pick an example like this just because I don't want to dare imply that she's even flirted with the intensity of my rants about the few things that matter more than my weekly State Of The Crossword speech.

** So far, this new strain of known flus has proven to be equally as infectious as every other common flu virus, and, by my observation, dramatically less lethal. So if you haven't died from a flu in the past, even if a few viruses manage to perform the near-impossible feat of getting past your force field of Purell, you probably won't die this time, either.

If you HAVE died from a flu in the past, well, let me apologize for my smarmy tone, and also for the overly chewy texture of my precious, delicious BRAAAAAAIIIINSSSSS!!!

*** Just to re-state for the record, and not because I have any particular love for the pork industry, eating pork can NOT give you any kind of swine flu. If you're worried about eating the flesh of an infected animal, your biggest concern should be nothing more than whether that pig's final coughing fits toughened up the meat too much and made it slightly less delicious than that of its blissfully immobile and fatty compatriots.

A note upon Inauguration 2009

I needn't point out that today is a special day. We all know my preference for president, so I won't go on about that.

I just want to state for the record how disappointed I am that this inauguration is taking place in the middle of the week, and that I am not able to be there. I know that as time goes on, life will leave me even less flexible to accommodate last-minute schedule changes for opportunities like this, so I had really hoped to make it happen somehow.

Alas, J- will be left watching with all the students in her school, I'll be watching with the kids until we have to take D- to preschool, but I'll do everything I can to make sure the kids remember this day even if only in some small way (such as vague memories that I wouldn't stop yammering on about it during Duplo time).

I won't do this because we've elected "a black president" but rather because we've broken the centuries-old mold of what a president must look like, and we've started chipping away at least a bit at who he or she has to know and be indebted to.

And possibly even more important than that is the fact that even though we elected yet another candidate from our democracy-choking Two Parties, it feels like we all cast aside the many safe, easy choices this time and went with someone whose fresh ideas (at least for our current age) we listened to and specifically responded to, one way or another.

How many people were genuinely inspired by John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, or either of the Bushes? These are people, among others, who benefitted from either "seeming presidential", having the right connections in a shallow pool, or just not screwing up enough to lose their party's nomination.

So for better or worse, we'll turn our back (at least for a little while) on the willfully irresponsible and damaging Bush years, and try our hand at shaping our own future. Even if Mr. Obama does nothing but speechify and Propose Big Things for four years, as long as he helps keep this momentum going, I think we can help ourselves just fine.

We can all tear down the duct tape and plastic wrap (for longer than it takes to hit the mall for the latest Thing We Don't Really Need), slide our Terror Alert Level down from Orange - Convenient Generalized Fear and Pliability to the never-before-seen Green - Commonsense Vigilance with Personal Freedom, let the sun shine on us and all our affairs, and then really start digging ourselves out of the many messes we're in.

It may make for a long few decades, but at least we can get through it with a smile and a lighter load on our shoulders. So here's to that!

It's hip to be timely

I know I haven't had too much to say about my wife on this blog, but it's not for lack of amusing stories or anything else. I just tend to procrastinate when it comes to writing about important things, and on many occasions I've let opportunities pass by where J- would be revealed as the amazing and funny person she is.

After a month or two of procrastinating, things start to feel stale and tedious and they pile up in my Drafts folder.

Take our fifth anniversary over a month ago-- wouldn't you expect some sappy post with a scrapbook of pictures and such? Or, knowing me, some sarcastic post with one picture, two at most, and a handful of tangential footnotes? I actually have more than a few pictures and a ridiculous story to tell about that day, but there it sits, and probably will for a while longer yet.

But that's not what this post is about.

Since I haven't said all that much about her, you won't mind me completely mischaracterizing her in your minds by way of introducing the subject of this post: almost six years ago now, she violently ripped the lining of her right hip socket while kickboxing.

She has limped along ever since on her remaining hip, which wasn't so great to begin with, trying and failing for various reasons (including lovely insurance debacles and poorly timed pregnancies) to have the problem surgically corrected. As you can imagine, the pregnancies made that hip sing like a finely tuned machine.

She's sleeping as I write this, as I should be, but today at noon she will fall asleep again. While she's sleeping, she'll be sliced open and have her femur yanked out of the socket, to allow the doctors to scrape out the remaining shreds of labrum and grind into oblivion the pesky bone spur on the end of her femur that started all this mess.

Then, assuming all goes well, they'll stitch her back up and send her hobbling on her merry way, to slowly recover over the next month and a half as she avoids putting any pressure on that leg so the bone doesn't shatter before it's completely healed.

Such is the fun she's bravely facing this holiday season, starting with a Thanksgiving spent as the immobile centerpiece for my extended family's celebration at my parents' house.*

Why is this happening now, you ask? Because she wanted to be sure she'd miss as few school days as possible, while not passing up another chance to get this done once and for all by waiting till next summer. She fills me with faith that this world is not completely lost, as she slogs through everything life throws at her without wasting too much time regretting paths she might have taken.

In the last few weeks, she moved from Drone to Zombie mode in continuing to get up at 5AM while staying late into the evening planning* and preparing everyone around her for her absence at this crucial stage of the year, making plans and more, all to be sure that her extremely underprivileged, forgotten students don't stop the unprecedented (and thankfully, quantifiable in enough areas to buy her some leeway) progress they've made since she took this school by storm last year.

All this leads up to her, a person about as averse to even the idea of surgery as you're likely to find, getting carved up with only the hope of feeling better at some point next year, even without that last little bit of handy buffer between the bones of her hip joint.

We may be back here some day down the road for the other hip, but hopefully it will hear enough horror stories from this one to shape up all by itself.

As for the kickboxing, no matter how successful her recovery is, I don't think she'll be dropping into any Thai cage matches or ill-advised college P.E. classes any time soon.

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* Thanks to my parents, she has a place to stay that isn't up three flights of stairs, and thanks to them (and my sister), I'll have a little help managing the kids during J-'s recovery.

** Fifteen special-needs teenagers in one classroom equals 15 separate daily plans.

The rules of M-, Vol. 1

Here are just five of the rules for life my 20-month-old daughter M- seems to live by:

1. If you find a little bit of something gross on the floor and you're struck with the admirable idea that you should go throw it away, you immediately get credit for that, even if you give up after one guess of which cabinet hides the garbage can and you then unceremoniously eat said bit.

2. Children must be heard and seen, at all times.

3. As long as you combine the vocabulary of a 4-year-old and the logical powers of a 5-year-old with the cuteness of a 6-week-old, people are much more willing to forgive the destructiveness of a 17-year-old.

4. Everyone must inform a high-ranking baby of every single thing they are doing, big or small.

5. Insisting that adults repeat something on demand over and over again, long after you know their response back and forth, will not only cement it in your memory, but it will push them into a hypnotic state in which it's impossible for them to resist digging out a pacifier for you.

See also: The rules of D-

Can't you smell that smell?

So recently, the office in our apartment (which is really more like an overgrown screened balcony) has taken on, shall we say, a horrendously unpleasant odor. Now, I don't mean to insult the office by suggesting it smelled like our neighbors were cooking again, because this was quite a different smell. Nor did we think we had somehow left a diaper in there (we closed up shop during the winter and don't go in there often).

No, this smelled distinctly like some kind of animal, such as a mouse, had crawled into a corner somewhere and quietly shuffled off this mortal coil.

Upon further investigation, it turned out to be merely the smell of damp old carpet, due to a leak somewhere in the wall. After even further investigation, however, it turns out I was partially right (one can generally assume that I'm always at least partially right). When moving everything away from the wall where the rain was leaking in, I discovered what can only be described as a mouse that is not alive:

How long this poor bastard lay there decomposing, I'm not sure, but I don't envy the condition or stench of his surroundings. Of course, he's clearly been dead, or possibly undead, for decades or longer, so I doubt he noticed much.

A wake was held between 1pm and 1:01pm on Friday, May 1, at My Office Funeral Home. The deceased was then laid to rest in Toy Chest Memorial Cemetary.

Oh my god, Dad, what-everrr

Is it just me, or does this provide a blurry little peek into the next decade?

D- slumped over on the couch, lost in a videogame, and M- posing while casually chatting on a cell phone... (shudder)

That's it, we're officially Luddites from now on!

...Except I still get to use my Wii... and my DVR.
And some other stuff.

Okay, just the kids will be Luddites.

Oh, that's an old bowling injury...

J- discovered, as did I many months ago, that with the advent of Wii Sports, it's possible to strain much more than just your thumb while playing videogames. Two hours of Wii Bowling may get you (J-) a lot closer to Professional status (a.k.a. Dan League), but it can also get you a sore shoulder and hamstring.

As a seasoned veteran, I know enough to recognize Wii Shoulder on the horizon and to switch to lefty in response, so I was in the clear the next day. There's nothing like watching someone lay on the couch after a long day of work only to hear her complaining about being sore from all the videogames she played on the weekend.

The sad thing is, you may have noticed we're on a bit of a Wii kick of late, and odds are good we'll both be right back at it today. She should probably let herself heal up before facing me again, but then she's just as competitive as me. Maybe I'll do some Wii boxing during naptime today, to keep it fair. With our luck, we'll both be stiff as zombies tomorrow.

The great and holy St. Padraig's Day

It's on days like today that I reflect upon what a crazy life I've led since I last walked the hallowed halls of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall of 2003. Marriage, two kids, two cross-country moves... who knows what's next? I just know that college is another world quite far away from this one:

For the scholars in the aptly named Champaign, IL, today is the unwelcome end to the St. Patrick's Day Weekend, which traditionally begins, at the latest, the Thursday preceding the day itself and ends on whichever is later of the day itself or the end of the weekend, which may or may not extend several days into the week.

Other notable events around these parts are that the city of Chicago dyed the river a slightly different shade of green than usual, a bunch of people marched in the street Saturday afternoon for reasons unclear, and lots of UIUC alums spent the weekend reliving their college days.

I've always felt a special connection to St. Patrick's Day, since it's my middle name. I always hated it for some reason (probably to do with my brothers' declarations, as with so many other things, that it should be a source of shame), and it was nice to have a day celebrating it. Unfortunately, since I'm not religious and not much of a drinker, there's little left to do on the day except try to remember to wear a green shirt, or something.

Celebration accomplished!

Shrug.

Spending my daylight time

Apparently we forgot to tell M- that Daddy was promised she would wake up an hour later today...

Let me just say that, children aside, I still hate Daylight Saving Time. I think it's antiquated and unnecessary, regardless of the purported side benefits of fewer car accidents at rush hour and less energy consumed overall. I'm too tired to think of how these aspects are offset somewhere else, but I know they are.

I wish more states (and countries) would rebel and we could all just give up the ridiculousness.

This agony is not worth the one day with an hour of extra sleep. Especially when kids just wake up an hour earlier then, anyway. Damn well-rested children.

Eeeeeeeeee!!

Building on her success in signing for "more" to get what she wants, M- has moved on into attempts at speech, in a big way. When she's concerned we're not getting her 20-time-daily-feeding message, or when she wants to celebrate that we got her message, she will smile and say "Eeeee! Eeeeeee!!" (for "eat") as she steadily approaches us or the food source:
And in case you were wondering, yes, she does quite resemble a zombie repeating a single syllable as she toddles over, rocking from side to side in that "leave me alone, I'm still learning to walk" way that 1-year-olds do.

Meanwhile, J- and I are stuck watching in horror, feeling an oppressive wave of impending doom, knowing we may be destined to live the next year either in front of a high chair, allowing a child to feed herself from the floor (because that's where all food ends up when M-'s in charge of it), or strapping a feed bag to said baby's face and hoping Child Services isn't making surprise housecalls that day. It's a tough situation to be in, but I know I'll make the right call.

I'm just not sure which call that is at the moment.