Do you know what the difference between mommies and daddies is?
It's that mommies use a variety of psychological weapons (from guilt to threatening to the intricate bonds of love) to help make their children into fully functional adults. It takes many years, it's very tricky business, and it requires the mother to give a lot of her time and emotional resources to do.
It looks really hard.
Daddies, on the other hand, just use daddy magic. You can solve any problem with daddy magic, quickly and easily. There's a reason that Santa Claus is a man, you know. No woman could whisk up a chimney by touching her nose, to say nothing of jiggling her tummy like a bowlful of jelly.
Here's an example: say you're cooking and a piece of eggshell ends up in the mix. What do you do?
Well, if you're a mommy, you get a spoon and you laboriously work with the eggs to fish out the offending piece of shell. It takes time, and effort, and you end up with one more thing to wash.
But with the power of daddy magic, you know that you can leave the eggshell in. Why? Because it's all healthy, baby! The only real reason to not put the whole egg in is because the shell touched the chicken's butt and you don't want it in your food. Otherwise eggshell is practically health food! And with the power of daddy magic and a hot oven and nobody watching you, that eggshell can stay right in the mix.
Problem solved!
This morning I awoke practically suffused with daddy magic. And I needed it, too, because the children were playing their favorite game: "I'll answer a question not meant for me."
After I got up and showered, I got the children out of bed and told them to get dressed. Amidst much grumbling and fumbling, they rolled out of their beds like zombies arising from the grave.
"Don't forget to brush your hair!" I yelled at the girl.
"Dad, I don't have any hair!" yelled the boy.
"I meant your sister!" I said.
"I'm in the bathroom!" she yells at me.
"Well, do it when you get out!" I yell back.
"I'm not in the bathroom!" the boy yells to me.
And on, and on, and on, until I'm dreaming of sticking their bodies in a crawl space and running off to Monaco. Not that I'd ever do such a thing.
Mostly because our rented house is crawlspace-free, and I'll be darned if I'm going to put one in and increase the property value for the landlord (see a related discussion of the hot water heater).
Also, the cost of living in Monaco is way too high. Now Sweden, that's an ideal relocation spot, except for the crappy weather and all the Swedes. Oh, and the language, which sounds just like the Swedish chef. Orgis-borgis humby-bumby!
So I finally got them up, dressed, and fed, which was no mean feat. Being a proactive father, I'd already made their lunches for today, so all I had to do was get them to put all their school stuff together so we could leave. Think of it like preparing your spell components before you go into combat.
(That's geek-talk, by the way, so be thankful if you don't understand it)
The girl finished packing her backpack with homework, lunch, and swim bag, and had a nice, neat, slim, trim, pack.
Meanwhile the boy is hopping up and down on his backpack like something out of a 50's cartoon trying to jam all his crap in there, and it's swelling up, and when he finally gets it closed it's swollen and the zippers are straining like fat Jared's from Subway's pants.
"Does your backpack always look like that?" I ask.
"Oh, yeah, don't worry," he says. "It's not a problem."
I have my doubts. I think Wifey would have mentioned if his backpack looked like a tick stuck on an artery. But you know what? He could lift it, so by the power of daddy magic, I declare this problem solved!
But I swear I don't know what he took to school today that he should have left home. And further, I don't want to know. So by the power of daddy magic, I declare this not my problem!
See how powerful daddy magic is? From using Hold Person to freeze a child to Power Word Kill on spiders to Bibgy's Offensive Fart, daddies have got all the power in a family thanks to the might of daddy magic.
Finally we head for the door and as she passes, the girl's hair takes a snap at me, and I look down on her head and I see a nest ready to harbor the entire Christmas song: three calling birds, four French hens, and a partridge in a pear tree.
"Did you brush your hair like I asked?"
The boy stamps furiously and yells "FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, I DON'T HAVE HAIR!"
With an ego like that, the boy will go far. Perhaps even the presidency someday.
"Of course I did," the girl said in her best condescending voice.
For a brief moment, the psychic specter of Wifey appeared in the room, staring down on us gravely and shaking her head. Wherever she was, she was having an out-of-body experience and telling me, in her best Jor-El way, that this was not the way that things were meant to be.
But you know what? Using the power of daddy magic, I dispelled the specter and declared this not a problem!
"Okay," I shrugged. "Whatever."
I'm telling you, I'm at least a tenth-level dad.
(That's more geek talk, by the way)
So I loaded them into the car and we were off to drop them at the house of the nice lady who is taking them to school while Wifey is away.
In the backseat, I hear one of them whisper to the other one "He's a lot easier than mommy. He didn't even make me put on socks!"
You know what? I engaged my daddy magic to cast cone of silence around myself, and after that just didn't pay any more attention.
Once I'd dropped them off, it was off to work. And you know what I found out?
Daddy magic has its limits. See, I was thrilled because instead of drinking lukewarm roach feces as coffee today at home, I could drink from the coffee machine at work. It's got all kinds of choices: coffee, expresso, mocaccino, the works! Only today it was broken, for the first time ever. Do you know why?
It was out of water.
Now, really, I live in a country where it rains 300 days a year. There was water in the water fountain, the toilets, and the parking lot. Why wasn't there any water in the coffee machine?
I don't know, but it made me want to take the day off. So in protest I fiddled around on the Internet all day and didn't get anything accomplished.
(Technically, this is very similar to what I normally do, but never mind about that)
Sometime during the day I got an angry e-mail about one of the children not wearing socks in cold weather, but I used the powerful daddy magic spell Forward to send it on to Wifey so she could worry about it next week.
Unfortunately, my mini-vacation from the children ended, and it was time to go pick the savage little monsters up. We came home and, the specter of Mommy hanging over us like a cloud of doom, obediently checked the schedule for what we were supposed to eat: chicken nuggets.
Now, when Wifey left (about six weeks ago, if I reckon correctly) I remember her nattering something about how she didn't have time to get us chicken nuggets and I'd have to go buy them.
Like that's going to happen. I don't even know where the grocery store is. The only store I know the location of is the flammable stuff store, where you can buy gas, firewood, hard liquor, and porn. It's within walking distance of the house, which is good, because often I like to stroll over there and partake of one or more of those items before coming home.
Given that, we needed to go off-list. I informed the children of this eventuality.
"I'm not hungry," the girl said. "I'll go without."
"I want some more tuna casserole," the boy said. "But I'm going to wait over here near the exit while you make it in case there's trouble."
So we compromised: leftover casserole for me and the boy, cold hot dogs for the girl. Hey, don't laugh, it was a major coup: both children got something that they loved. I promised them that I'd use my daddy magic to keep the terrible curse of mommy at bay and get us through dinner without any problems at all.
As we ate, peacefully, the boy looked at me, and he said (and I swear I am not making this up):
"You know what, daddy? When you're gone, and mommy's here, things are hard. But when mommy's gone, and you're here, things are easy. And when you're both here, things are kind of medium."
My heart swelled with pride. This, from the boy who once told me he couldn't wait until I died and mommy married a new, better daddy. This from the boy who once told mommy he wished he were bigger so he could beat me up. This from the boy who comes into my room, checks to see if I'm breathing, and says "darn" when I am.
I'm his favorite parent! Let's hear it for the awesome power of daddy magic! I think I've gained at least two levels thanks to Wifey's trip! I must be up to Sorcerer by now!
(Please pardon the excessive geekiness of the preceding sentence)
But of course I needed to hear it in full, so probed for the ultimate payoff, the phrase that I could use to gloat and demean Wifey for the rest of our marriage together:
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"It means he likes you better than mom," the girl said.
"No it doesn't!" he said. "It means that since he doesn't know any of the rules or how to do anything we can get away with whatever we want! I haven't changed my underwear in days and days and days."
And with that he dumped milk all over my plate trying to do a fist-bump with me.
Little SOB! I showed him who was boss: he spent the rest of the night practicing doing his handwriting while I harangued him about his poor attitude. His lettering ended up fairly smeared with his tears.
I swear, where do they get this attitude? I'm all about respect and treating other people justly. I never do or say bad things! Kids these days. It's the TV, that's what it is, all right.
Finally, utterly humiliated, I sent the children to bed, ignoring the bickering and trail of toothpaste in the hallway to come upstairs and type out this summary of my day before crawling off to bed for another horrifying night here in Death House.
I feel drained, as if I've lost several experience levels from the chill touch of the Specter of Wifey, reaching out to punish me for not eating the chicken nuggets like I was supposed to or some other obscure violation of some rule that I never even knew existed, like how children are supposed to wear socks or something.
I'll tell you this much: if she thinks I'm going to water her plants she's fooling herself, that's for darn sure. Even so, I think I'll check the list to see if there's anything I need to pick up on my way home tomorrow.
You know, just in case.
Four down, seven to go.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Three Down, Eight to Go
When I awoke this morning, the only way that I knew that I hadn't been slaughtered by an errant poltergeist overnight was the feeling of cotton slowly swelling my groggy, befuddled head.
Ye gods, what a night!
I went to bed early because I was horrifically stuffy and exhausted. Everything I did yesterday seemed to sap my strength, as if I were Sisyphus constantly struggling to make some kind of progress against the Herculean task of watching two largely self-sufficient children all by myself while nursing a head cold.
Even the nap wore me out!
But the sweet release of sleep was not to be mine. I couldn't take Nyquil for two reasons: firstly, I needed to be aware for the inevitable break-in by some sociopath hell-bent on slaughtering me in a gruesome, SAW-esque fashion. I needed all my powers of detection at peak strength to be ready to detect and flee from just such a problem.
Secondly, if one of the children hollered for me overnight and I didn't respond, they'd complain to mommy, and then I'd wish that a homicidal maniac had broken into the house.
So I settled down to a non-drugged sleep. The sacrifices I make for my children! But sleep came slowly because, as I may have mentioned before, our house is haunted by the heavy-breathing floor-creaking daddy-creeping ghost from hell. And I swear I heard scratching on the roof all night, but I'll be darned if I'm going to open the door and discover my dead boyfriend's body hanging by his heels and then have some hook-handed maniac hunker down in the back seat and slaughter me as I drive home.
Or, you know, something like that.
Worse, when I did finally drift off, I awoke from time to time with a river of snot flowing freely forth from my sinuses, and I had to towel it off with tissues. And then I had to repeat the whole thing again, going back to sleep with all the scratching and screeching and me wetting the bed with no small regularity.
I was pretty parched by morning. Plus I had enough tissues stuck to my head with snot that the kids thought I was a mummy and hit me with a dictionary.
The first thing I did (after rubbing the imprint out of my forehead) was to take a shower. And let me tell you, I'm coming around on this whole "bigger hot water heater" thing that Wifey's been pushing lately. She just might be onto something.
Then I went downstairs and started heating a cup of hot water, when I realized that there was no coffee to be had. So I did what any normal person would do: I howled obscenities and tore the cupboard apart.
And there, in the back, I found it: "NEW NESCAFE DESSERT COFFEE: NOW WITH LESS ROACH AND SHOE SHAVINGS!"
Ooooh, baby! It was caffeinated! I don't care if it's made from goat foreskin; I'm drinking that stuff down!
From the first sip, suddenly a chorus of angelic voices resounded throughout the kitchen, and I swear I levitated a few inches off the ground. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! I am saved, brothers and sisters! Saved!
Take that, Wifey!
Now I was full of vigor and ready to go. All was well with the world! So I loaded the kids into the car and we went to church. Not much to say about that, except that we arrived well before the time we usually arrive when Wifey is here with us. Not that I'm saying that she's the delay, I'm just saying…
I better stop now. Let's just say all went well.
When we got home, it was time to start laundry. I don't know if you've ever tried to sort and wash and dry laundry with a seven and nine year old, but this is not the easiest of tasks.
First came the complaints, which I deftly parried by asking them if they wanted their DS's to become my property until Mommy returned.
(It's fortunate that they don't realize this is totally a bluff: I mean, am I really going to take the thing that distracts them in complete silence for hours at a time just because they're being a pain in the ass? Of course not! If Wifey doesn't come back, which is a distinct possibility, I'm going to marry those DS's and give them guardianship over the kids, since I'll expect them to do a good bit of the raising of the children.)
Second came the questions: does this white shirt go in lights? Do these black pants go in darks? Can bears climb trees?
This last one from the boy, for no real reason. I told him it depended on the bear, and he starts running through all the bears he knows: what about Polar Bears? Grizzly Bears? Winnie the Pooh? The Country Bear Jamboree Bears? What about them, huh?
I told them it didn't matter since all bears would be extinct soon under the world government's "Earth for Earthlings" policy, and that seemed to satisfy him. When they questioned me about it, I told them to ask their teachers, who were all big fans of the United World Government.
That'll learn those meddling teachers for criticizing my kid's lunches and sending home shitty little notes about telling your kids to be "friends" with everybody.
What if some other kid's a jerk? I tell my kids that if some kid is hassling them, just aim for the face and punch as hard as they can, since most children have a glass jaw. I even give them punching lessons.
Well, when mommy's not around I do. Not that I did that today. Or at least, not that I'll admit to.
After laundry was well started the kids wanted to know what was for lunch. I convinced them to do scrounge, where we just dug up whatever. So the girl and I polished off the chicken man from yesterday (not a man who is a chicken, but chicken bought from a man). And the boy had a hot dog.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of the leftovers.
The next few hours are kind of a blur. I remember telling the children to leave me alone, and I remember them not doing it, and I vaguely remember telling the girl to go do her homework or something, but quite frankly, it feels like I spent about forty years in solitary confinement with a speed-addicted two-year-old jonesing for a hit.
I realized as evening wore on that we'd need to do something for dinner. I was about to propose ordering Chinese when I remembered that Wifey has hexed the house to rise up and destroy us if we don't follow her list. So it's time the check, for the first time, what Wifey's put on the menu, because she doubtless bought the ingredients too. Or so I dearly hope.
And the lucky winner is: tuna casserole!
Well isn't that just great? The boy's favorite meal, which unfortunately requires preparation and lots of dish-washing before it's all said and done. Not coincidentally, this is also something Wifey doesn't particularly care for, nor does the girl.
So it falls to Daddy to make this, and yet both children know Wifey was the one who prepared the menu, so she gets all the love and adoration from the boy for including his favorite meal. It's like being married to Machiavelli sometimes.
Wary of having glass shards in close proximity to my testicles again, though, I dutifully followed the menu. So I'm cooking away when the girl wanders in.
"Can I help?" she asks.
"Sure! Grate a block of cheese!"
See, in our family, when a recipe says "sprinkle cheese" what it really means is "put a six-inch layer of cheese on top." Because cheese is like freedom: the more you have, the better off you are.
Then the boy wanders in. "Can I help?"
"Sure! Set the table."
"No, I want to help cook," he says.
"I don't have any job for you."
"Oh," he looks around wistfully. "So then can I have some cheese?"
So we're putting all the ingredients together, and when the girl dumps the cheese on top of the casserole, I see something that horrifies me: her nails contain the dirt and grime of several weeks beneath them.
"Did you wash your hands like I asked?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. I don't remember you asking."
"I'm pretty sure I did," I say. "Those nails are filthy, and you've been fondling our cheese for the past ten minutes!"
"This one's fine!" she protests, holding up her first finger. I see that it has, in fact, no nail.
"What are you talking about, doofus?" I ask. "You don't have a fingernail there."
"What?" she looks at her finger. "I did when I started. I remember because I had just cleaned the dirt out of it using your toothbrush, because this is the finger I pick my nose with, and I want it to be clean."
Serenity now. Serenity now. Serenity now.
So I was faced with a dilemma: to eat, or not to eat, the tuna-and-booger-fingernail casserole. On the one hand, it's just whatever fingernail's made of. It's not harmful. On the other hand, it's a fingernail. Although, if you think about it, it should have been semi-clean. But on the other hand, it's a fingernail.
I ended up deciding to eat the casserole. Oh, don't make that face: if you screwed around with the damn thing for thirty minutes in a cursed house, you'd cook and eat it too. So just spare me your high horsing.
But I will admit that I scrutinized dinner a little bit more judiciously than usual.
After dinner, we were cleaning up when a foul, wretched smell reached my nose. It seemed like a mix of stinky cheese, unwashed socks, and motor oil.
"Shh!" I warned the children. "I think we have a prowler in the house. Probably a Frenchman."
I hefted up a golf club and began creeping through the house. But no matter where I went, he was one step ahead of me, his foul odor lingering behind him but me catching neither sight nor sound of him.
Finally frustrated, I stopped.
"Have you found him yet, dad?" the boy asked.
I took two whiffs and replied. "Yup," I said. "And he is you."
"Ha ha!" the girl laughed. "You stink!"
"I can't stink!" the boy protested. "I just showered, uh, you know, uh,"
"That's what I thought," I said. "And what about you, little missy? When did you last wash?"
"I went to swimming on Monday," she said haughtily. "So you can forget about me smelling bad."
"Both of you in the shower," I insisted. "You know your mother wouldn't let you go to school stinking like this."
"But mom's not here," the boy said slyly.
"Yeah," the girl said. "And you're cooler than she is."
Now, I have to admit, I was tempted: it's not like the kids sleep upwind of me or anything, and the lure of being "cool" is pretty strong. And they do go to swimming on Mondays, which is a lot like taking a bath.
But letting your kids wallow in their own filth is the sign of being a bad parent. It's also a sign of being a hippie, and the last thing I want to raise is a hippie.
(Slight digression: there are lots of things I can handle my children deciding to become, up to and including a lawyer. But I will feel that I, as a parent, have failed if my child goes on to become, in descending order, an environmental engineer, reality-TV star, sociologist, or hippie.)
So I took the children upstairs and washed them. But since it was close to bedtime, I had to give them a DAW, or Daddy-Assisted Washing. This is where I control the water and hose them down, then they wash off, then I rinse them. Kind of like in a prison movie.
The girl went first, and all went well. She knows the drill. Then they boy came up. I should have foreseen trouble based on how giggly he was when he got in, but stupidly I foresaw nothing.
At one point I have to put shampoo on his head. So I hand him the shower nozzle and say "hold this perfectly still."
Which, translated into child language, means "Spray me in the face with this and then drop it and let it spray me all over with hot water while you stand there and cry that there are bubbles getting in your eye."
After he got out I realized that his armpits were completely dry, while mine were totally soaked.
Do you suppose Wifey will notice if there's only one child when she gets home?
Then it was off to bed for them, and now Daddy's going to go have some quality time with a soon-to-be-empty unopened bottle of whiskey.
Only eight more days left.
Ye gods, what a night!
I went to bed early because I was horrifically stuffy and exhausted. Everything I did yesterday seemed to sap my strength, as if I were Sisyphus constantly struggling to make some kind of progress against the Herculean task of watching two largely self-sufficient children all by myself while nursing a head cold.
Even the nap wore me out!
But the sweet release of sleep was not to be mine. I couldn't take Nyquil for two reasons: firstly, I needed to be aware for the inevitable break-in by some sociopath hell-bent on slaughtering me in a gruesome, SAW-esque fashion. I needed all my powers of detection at peak strength to be ready to detect and flee from just such a problem.
Secondly, if one of the children hollered for me overnight and I didn't respond, they'd complain to mommy, and then I'd wish that a homicidal maniac had broken into the house.
So I settled down to a non-drugged sleep. The sacrifices I make for my children! But sleep came slowly because, as I may have mentioned before, our house is haunted by the heavy-breathing floor-creaking daddy-creeping ghost from hell. And I swear I heard scratching on the roof all night, but I'll be darned if I'm going to open the door and discover my dead boyfriend's body hanging by his heels and then have some hook-handed maniac hunker down in the back seat and slaughter me as I drive home.
Or, you know, something like that.
Worse, when I did finally drift off, I awoke from time to time with a river of snot flowing freely forth from my sinuses, and I had to towel it off with tissues. And then I had to repeat the whole thing again, going back to sleep with all the scratching and screeching and me wetting the bed with no small regularity.
I was pretty parched by morning. Plus I had enough tissues stuck to my head with snot that the kids thought I was a mummy and hit me with a dictionary.
The first thing I did (after rubbing the imprint out of my forehead) was to take a shower. And let me tell you, I'm coming around on this whole "bigger hot water heater" thing that Wifey's been pushing lately. She just might be onto something.
Then I went downstairs and started heating a cup of hot water, when I realized that there was no coffee to be had. So I did what any normal person would do: I howled obscenities and tore the cupboard apart.
And there, in the back, I found it: "NEW NESCAFE DESSERT COFFEE: NOW WITH LESS ROACH AND SHOE SHAVINGS!"
Ooooh, baby! It was caffeinated! I don't care if it's made from goat foreskin; I'm drinking that stuff down!
From the first sip, suddenly a chorus of angelic voices resounded throughout the kitchen, and I swear I levitated a few inches off the ground. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! I am saved, brothers and sisters! Saved!
Take that, Wifey!
Now I was full of vigor and ready to go. All was well with the world! So I loaded the kids into the car and we went to church. Not much to say about that, except that we arrived well before the time we usually arrive when Wifey is here with us. Not that I'm saying that she's the delay, I'm just saying…
I better stop now. Let's just say all went well.
When we got home, it was time to start laundry. I don't know if you've ever tried to sort and wash and dry laundry with a seven and nine year old, but this is not the easiest of tasks.
First came the complaints, which I deftly parried by asking them if they wanted their DS's to become my property until Mommy returned.
(It's fortunate that they don't realize this is totally a bluff: I mean, am I really going to take the thing that distracts them in complete silence for hours at a time just because they're being a pain in the ass? Of course not! If Wifey doesn't come back, which is a distinct possibility, I'm going to marry those DS's and give them guardianship over the kids, since I'll expect them to do a good bit of the raising of the children.)
Second came the questions: does this white shirt go in lights? Do these black pants go in darks? Can bears climb trees?
This last one from the boy, for no real reason. I told him it depended on the bear, and he starts running through all the bears he knows: what about Polar Bears? Grizzly Bears? Winnie the Pooh? The Country Bear Jamboree Bears? What about them, huh?
I told them it didn't matter since all bears would be extinct soon under the world government's "Earth for Earthlings" policy, and that seemed to satisfy him. When they questioned me about it, I told them to ask their teachers, who were all big fans of the United World Government.
That'll learn those meddling teachers for criticizing my kid's lunches and sending home shitty little notes about telling your kids to be "friends" with everybody.
What if some other kid's a jerk? I tell my kids that if some kid is hassling them, just aim for the face and punch as hard as they can, since most children have a glass jaw. I even give them punching lessons.
Well, when mommy's not around I do. Not that I did that today. Or at least, not that I'll admit to.
After laundry was well started the kids wanted to know what was for lunch. I convinced them to do scrounge, where we just dug up whatever. So the girl and I polished off the chicken man from yesterday (not a man who is a chicken, but chicken bought from a man). And the boy had a hot dog.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of the leftovers.
The next few hours are kind of a blur. I remember telling the children to leave me alone, and I remember them not doing it, and I vaguely remember telling the girl to go do her homework or something, but quite frankly, it feels like I spent about forty years in solitary confinement with a speed-addicted two-year-old jonesing for a hit.
I realized as evening wore on that we'd need to do something for dinner. I was about to propose ordering Chinese when I remembered that Wifey has hexed the house to rise up and destroy us if we don't follow her list. So it's time the check, for the first time, what Wifey's put on the menu, because she doubtless bought the ingredients too. Or so I dearly hope.
And the lucky winner is: tuna casserole!
Well isn't that just great? The boy's favorite meal, which unfortunately requires preparation and lots of dish-washing before it's all said and done. Not coincidentally, this is also something Wifey doesn't particularly care for, nor does the girl.
So it falls to Daddy to make this, and yet both children know Wifey was the one who prepared the menu, so she gets all the love and adoration from the boy for including his favorite meal. It's like being married to Machiavelli sometimes.
Wary of having glass shards in close proximity to my testicles again, though, I dutifully followed the menu. So I'm cooking away when the girl wanders in.
"Can I help?" she asks.
"Sure! Grate a block of cheese!"
See, in our family, when a recipe says "sprinkle cheese" what it really means is "put a six-inch layer of cheese on top." Because cheese is like freedom: the more you have, the better off you are.
Then the boy wanders in. "Can I help?"
"Sure! Set the table."
"No, I want to help cook," he says.
"I don't have any job for you."
"Oh," he looks around wistfully. "So then can I have some cheese?"
So we're putting all the ingredients together, and when the girl dumps the cheese on top of the casserole, I see something that horrifies me: her nails contain the dirt and grime of several weeks beneath them.
"Did you wash your hands like I asked?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. I don't remember you asking."
"I'm pretty sure I did," I say. "Those nails are filthy, and you've been fondling our cheese for the past ten minutes!"
"This one's fine!" she protests, holding up her first finger. I see that it has, in fact, no nail.
"What are you talking about, doofus?" I ask. "You don't have a fingernail there."
"What?" she looks at her finger. "I did when I started. I remember because I had just cleaned the dirt out of it using your toothbrush, because this is the finger I pick my nose with, and I want it to be clean."
Serenity now. Serenity now. Serenity now.
So I was faced with a dilemma: to eat, or not to eat, the tuna-and-booger-fingernail casserole. On the one hand, it's just whatever fingernail's made of. It's not harmful. On the other hand, it's a fingernail. Although, if you think about it, it should have been semi-clean. But on the other hand, it's a fingernail.
I ended up deciding to eat the casserole. Oh, don't make that face: if you screwed around with the damn thing for thirty minutes in a cursed house, you'd cook and eat it too. So just spare me your high horsing.
But I will admit that I scrutinized dinner a little bit more judiciously than usual.
After dinner, we were cleaning up when a foul, wretched smell reached my nose. It seemed like a mix of stinky cheese, unwashed socks, and motor oil.
"Shh!" I warned the children. "I think we have a prowler in the house. Probably a Frenchman."
I hefted up a golf club and began creeping through the house. But no matter where I went, he was one step ahead of me, his foul odor lingering behind him but me catching neither sight nor sound of him.
Finally frustrated, I stopped.
"Have you found him yet, dad?" the boy asked.
I took two whiffs and replied. "Yup," I said. "And he is you."
"Ha ha!" the girl laughed. "You stink!"
"I can't stink!" the boy protested. "I just showered, uh, you know, uh,"
"That's what I thought," I said. "And what about you, little missy? When did you last wash?"
"I went to swimming on Monday," she said haughtily. "So you can forget about me smelling bad."
"Both of you in the shower," I insisted. "You know your mother wouldn't let you go to school stinking like this."
"But mom's not here," the boy said slyly.
"Yeah," the girl said. "And you're cooler than she is."
Now, I have to admit, I was tempted: it's not like the kids sleep upwind of me or anything, and the lure of being "cool" is pretty strong. And they do go to swimming on Mondays, which is a lot like taking a bath.
But letting your kids wallow in their own filth is the sign of being a bad parent. It's also a sign of being a hippie, and the last thing I want to raise is a hippie.
(Slight digression: there are lots of things I can handle my children deciding to become, up to and including a lawyer. But I will feel that I, as a parent, have failed if my child goes on to become, in descending order, an environmental engineer, reality-TV star, sociologist, or hippie.)
So I took the children upstairs and washed them. But since it was close to bedtime, I had to give them a DAW, or Daddy-Assisted Washing. This is where I control the water and hose them down, then they wash off, then I rinse them. Kind of like in a prison movie.
The girl went first, and all went well. She knows the drill. Then they boy came up. I should have foreseen trouble based on how giggly he was when he got in, but stupidly I foresaw nothing.
At one point I have to put shampoo on his head. So I hand him the shower nozzle and say "hold this perfectly still."
Which, translated into child language, means "Spray me in the face with this and then drop it and let it spray me all over with hot water while you stand there and cry that there are bubbles getting in your eye."
After he got out I realized that his armpits were completely dry, while mine were totally soaked.
Do you suppose Wifey will notice if there's only one child when she gets home?
Then it was off to bed for them, and now Daddy's going to go have some quality time with a soon-to-be-empty unopened bottle of whiskey.
Only eight more days left.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
This is the End...of Day 2
The kids are in bed. My head is throbbing. But I've reached the end of the second day of being without Wifey. Which, if you think about it, is really the first full day. But I digress...
After I'd showered and shaved, I felt somewhat better. We went and did a little shopping at the open-air market, it was time to prepare our costumes for the Halloween party tonight. See, we'd been invited to a costume party, and after much deliberation I had convinced the children that we should go with "theme" costumes so we can all dress the same.
Our theme? The Royal Family from a deck of cards. So the girl was the Queen of Hearts, the boy was the Jack of Diamonds, and I was the King of Clubs (complete with golf clubs, because I love a good pun). Wifey, ever helpful, had designed and executed three really fabulous card fronts for us to wear.
All I had to do was finish the back of them and then figure out a way to get them to hang on us, which only took me about an hour and six yards of tape. Ah, tape. Is there any problem it can't solve?
While I was in the middle of this, I got a call from Wifey.
"So, you're alive!" I said. "That's good!"
"I envy the dead," she said. "I really do."
And then she proceeded to tell me her tale of woe from yesterday. I can't possibly hope to convey to you the entirety of her awful trip, so let me hit the high points:
She sat next to Dr. Doom's mother. No, really! After hurrying through security and making her way to the plane, she ends up sitting next to a rotund Latvian woman who proceeds to detail her entire life story to Wifey, up to and including ten minutes ago when she got lost trying to get to the gates.
But wait, there's more! It turns out that this woman's life is a series of misfortunes caused by other people giving her misinformation (Wifey told me she suspected a bad case of dumbassery on the part of Mrs. Doom).
The best part is this: they were stalled on the tarmac for five hours. So Wifey spent five hours sitting still listening to this, then nine hours in the air listening to this. She put in her iPod, and Mrs. Doom talked. They ate dinner, and Mrs. Doom talked. She tried to sleep, and Mrs. Doom talked. She watched the movie, and Mrs. Doom talked.
In my mind, I see the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba is talking all about shrimp, only in a Latvian accent.
Desperate for something else to do, Wifey tried to get out her find-a-word book. Wifey likes doing these, but I don't, because I always get distracted trying to find dirty words they didn't mean to put into the grid but have on accident.
So Mrs. Doom starts pointing out words over her shoulder! How Wifey managed to keep from throttling this woman I will never quite understand.
Finally they begin the descent, and Wifey begins to dream of a life after Mrs. Doom. However, her new best friend had other ideas.
"After we land," Mrs. Doom says, "Can you help me find the luggage claim area."
"Yes, whatever," Wifey says, proving that she's a better human being than I am. "Just shut up ten minutes."
So Mrs. Doom shuts up ten minutes, and in this time, suddenly Wifey realizes something.
"You're not a citizen, are you?"
"No," Mrs. Doom says.
"Well, then, I can't help you. I go through a different passport control line."
"But you could wait for me," Mrs. Doom says.
"I have another flight." Wifey says. "But since I missed it, they've scheduled me on some different flight, I'm sure, and I don't know which one it is."
"I have a connecting flight too," Mrs. Doom says.
"But what if while I'm waiting for you my flight takes off?"
"It won't," Mrs. Doom says.
"But what if it does?" Wifey says.
"I only need you to show me where the luggage claim area is."
"I'm pretty sure there's a sign," Wifey says. "And besides, if I was near one of those rotating belt things and you were there I'm certain that I'd shove you on it and hope it decapitated you."
Okay, she probably didn't say the last part, but I'm sure she thought it.
When, finally, she arrived at the airport she couldn't get out fast enough.
So she's going through the customs area when an airport inspector comes up to her and asks her which flight she was on. The inspector frowns and says,
"Ma'am, we have reason to believe that there was a violation of the passenger's bill of rights during that flight."
"Really?" Wifey asks. "Because we sat on the tarmac for five hours with no food or drink?"
"No ma'am," the inspector says. "Is it true that they showed Land of the Lost?" Wifey nodded. "The horror," the guy says as he wanders off. "The horror..."
Well, after hearing that, I said the only thing to Wifey that a loving, caring husband can:
"Thank God I wasn't there. The kids would have driven us crazy."
Unfortunately, at that moment the line went dead.
Anyhoo, after a nap we were ready to go to the party decked out in our costumes (see what I did there? Card-themed costumes yield a lot of puns!)
It was quite a hootenanny, let me tell you! These people really know how to throw a party! And while everybody came as a wich, or vampire, and the kids came dressed as Clone soldiers (which I am convinced is either a neocon plot to lure kids into the army or a progressive plot to rob us of individual identities), we were the only playing-card themed costumes.
We were the hit of the party.
Everybody was amazed and impressed.
The whole crowd swooned over us.
Until the slutty she-devil arrived and knocked the wind right out of our sails. I mean, how do you compete with six inches of sheer red fabric, spiderweb tights, and double D cups?
You don't, that's how. But, being a man, I didn't mind so much.
The other part of the party that was good was that the people had hired a magician to entertain the children, so I didn't see hide nor hair of them for two hours. And at this rate, any break I get from them is magical in and of itself.
Ahh, sweet release.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and we eventually had to leave and come home. I cleaned us all up and sent the children to bed.
And I'll be going there myself quite shortly.
Two days down, nine to go.
After I'd showered and shaved, I felt somewhat better. We went and did a little shopping at the open-air market, it was time to prepare our costumes for the Halloween party tonight. See, we'd been invited to a costume party, and after much deliberation I had convinced the children that we should go with "theme" costumes so we can all dress the same.
Our theme? The Royal Family from a deck of cards. So the girl was the Queen of Hearts, the boy was the Jack of Diamonds, and I was the King of Clubs (complete with golf clubs, because I love a good pun). Wifey, ever helpful, had designed and executed three really fabulous card fronts for us to wear.
All I had to do was finish the back of them and then figure out a way to get them to hang on us, which only took me about an hour and six yards of tape. Ah, tape. Is there any problem it can't solve?
While I was in the middle of this, I got a call from Wifey.
"So, you're alive!" I said. "That's good!"
"I envy the dead," she said. "I really do."
And then she proceeded to tell me her tale of woe from yesterday. I can't possibly hope to convey to you the entirety of her awful trip, so let me hit the high points:
She sat next to Dr. Doom's mother. No, really! After hurrying through security and making her way to the plane, she ends up sitting next to a rotund Latvian woman who proceeds to detail her entire life story to Wifey, up to and including ten minutes ago when she got lost trying to get to the gates.
But wait, there's more! It turns out that this woman's life is a series of misfortunes caused by other people giving her misinformation (Wifey told me she suspected a bad case of dumbassery on the part of Mrs. Doom).
The best part is this: they were stalled on the tarmac for five hours. So Wifey spent five hours sitting still listening to this, then nine hours in the air listening to this. She put in her iPod, and Mrs. Doom talked. They ate dinner, and Mrs. Doom talked. She tried to sleep, and Mrs. Doom talked. She watched the movie, and Mrs. Doom talked.
In my mind, I see the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba is talking all about shrimp, only in a Latvian accent.
Desperate for something else to do, Wifey tried to get out her find-a-word book. Wifey likes doing these, but I don't, because I always get distracted trying to find dirty words they didn't mean to put into the grid but have on accident.
So Mrs. Doom starts pointing out words over her shoulder! How Wifey managed to keep from throttling this woman I will never quite understand.
Finally they begin the descent, and Wifey begins to dream of a life after Mrs. Doom. However, her new best friend had other ideas.
"After we land," Mrs. Doom says, "Can you help me find the luggage claim area."
"Yes, whatever," Wifey says, proving that she's a better human being than I am. "Just shut up ten minutes."
So Mrs. Doom shuts up ten minutes, and in this time, suddenly Wifey realizes something.
"You're not a citizen, are you?"
"No," Mrs. Doom says.
"Well, then, I can't help you. I go through a different passport control line."
"But you could wait for me," Mrs. Doom says.
"I have another flight." Wifey says. "But since I missed it, they've scheduled me on some different flight, I'm sure, and I don't know which one it is."
"I have a connecting flight too," Mrs. Doom says.
"But what if while I'm waiting for you my flight takes off?"
"It won't," Mrs. Doom says.
"But what if it does?" Wifey says.
"I only need you to show me where the luggage claim area is."
"I'm pretty sure there's a sign," Wifey says. "And besides, if I was near one of those rotating belt things and you were there I'm certain that I'd shove you on it and hope it decapitated you."
Okay, she probably didn't say the last part, but I'm sure she thought it.
When, finally, she arrived at the airport she couldn't get out fast enough.
So she's going through the customs area when an airport inspector comes up to her and asks her which flight she was on. The inspector frowns and says,
"Ma'am, we have reason to believe that there was a violation of the passenger's bill of rights during that flight."
"Really?" Wifey asks. "Because we sat on the tarmac for five hours with no food or drink?"
"No ma'am," the inspector says. "Is it true that they showed Land of the Lost?" Wifey nodded. "The horror," the guy says as he wanders off. "The horror..."
Well, after hearing that, I said the only thing to Wifey that a loving, caring husband can:
"Thank God I wasn't there. The kids would have driven us crazy."
Unfortunately, at that moment the line went dead.
Anyhoo, after a nap we were ready to go to the party decked out in our costumes (see what I did there? Card-themed costumes yield a lot of puns!)
It was quite a hootenanny, let me tell you! These people really know how to throw a party! And while everybody came as a wich, or vampire, and the kids came dressed as Clone soldiers (which I am convinced is either a neocon plot to lure kids into the army or a progressive plot to rob us of individual identities), we were the only playing-card themed costumes.
We were the hit of the party.
Everybody was amazed and impressed.
The whole crowd swooned over us.
Until the slutty she-devil arrived and knocked the wind right out of our sails. I mean, how do you compete with six inches of sheer red fabric, spiderweb tights, and double D cups?
You don't, that's how. But, being a man, I didn't mind so much.
The other part of the party that was good was that the people had hired a magician to entertain the children, so I didn't see hide nor hair of them for two hours. And at this rate, any break I get from them is magical in and of itself.
Ahh, sweet release.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and we eventually had to leave and come home. I cleaned us all up and sent the children to bed.
And I'll be going there myself quite shortly.
Two days down, nine to go.
Morning, day 2
By my reckoning, I've spent over 120 nights away from home since we moved here, or about 1/3 of a year. Four whole months. On those nights Wifey is solely responsible for everything to do with putting the kids to bed, and then turning out the house, and then going to bed herself. She never, not once, mentioned to me that we live in a house that makes the Amityville Horror look like Cinderella's castle.
How in the hell does she do it?
I'm laying in bed listening to all kinds of shit last night: heavy breathing, footsteps upstairs and downstairs, boards creaking, kids occasionally murmuring in their sleep, and noise from outside that was definitely some psychopath checking the windows to make sure they're locked.
But oh my God! I don't know how to lock the windows! Shit! What if she left one open? What if, right now, some seven-foot CHUDD-eating monstrosity is looming over me with a rusty chainsaw planning on sodomizing my vacant eye sockets as I scream for mercy?
So, in short, I kind of had trouble sleeping last night. Finally I drifted off into a fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep.
When I groggily came awake, I was pleased to find that my head cold, which had migrated to my vocal cords, had decided to come north for better climes and was back in my head. So I felt like crap.
Finally I dragged myself out of bed. I found the girl quickly, but the boy was nowhere to be see.
*whew* All that worrying for nothing! How could I forget that the monstrous evil infecting the house would go for the youngest kid first? Silly me.
So I was unrolling the fire ladder to go out the window (because I figured that, like Chucky, my zombified son waited downstairs to slaughter us with a cheese grater) when he pops up from under a pile of sheets and yells "BOO!"
I pissed my boxers.
Once we'd gotten everything cleaned up, and I'd threatened to murder him, we went downstairs for breakfast.
My head throbbing, I went for the one morning cure that solves everything: coffee.
I am the only coffee drinker in the house, and I only drink caffeinated coffee. It's not that I have anything against decaf, it's just that if I'm going to waste my time fiddling about heating water and mixing in coffee and whatnot, I want some kind of payoff.
Drinking decaf coffee is like being a lab rat trained to hit a button to not receive a pellet.
So I open up the coffee container and find that IT'S FREAKING EMPTY! I mean, really, is it so hard for Wifey to keep my coffee thing full for me? Apparently it is. But she doesn't care, because she's six hundred thousand miles away laying on a beach with some thong-clad muscle man massaging her toes.
First she curses the house, then she flushes my coffee down the toilet.
After a lot of rooting around, I found three different kinds of decaf tucked away in the cabinets. WTF? I guess those 120 mornings when she wakes up alone, she's making decaf coffee for somebody who isn't me.
We'll see who gets who with a cheese grater when she gets back, indeed.
Finally I came up with a stopgap solution (scraping enough coffee out of the empty container to make a lamentably weak brew that taunted you with its inefficacity) and made myself some coffee. I felt marginally better.
"What do you want for breakfast?" I ask the children.
"I want a special breakfast!" the Girl says. "Because mommy isn't here. Pwease?"
Sigh. Okay. So we rooted through the "special breakfast" stuf, and found Blueberry Cheescake muffin mix, which mommy hates. So we had a very special father/daughter bonding time making blueberry cheesecake muffins.
They boy, meanwhile, played his DS and ignored us fully.
When I bit into the first muffin, I remembered that Wifey wasn't the only one who didn't care for these things; they taske like lard with artificial blueberries in it. Ugh. But the girl liked them, so she ate mine, the boy's, and hers.
After breakfast, thwarted in my drive to defeat my cold with coffee, I decide to go with the other sure-fired cold cure. "I'm gonna take a shower," I said.
"What about my breakfast?" the boy asks.
"Get whatever you want," I say.
"But she got something special!" he says. "Why?"
"Uh," I didn't really have an answer for that.
"Because he loves me more, duh!" she says.
He starts to get mad at me when I cut him off. "Hey, only one of my children scared the piss out of me this morning!"
Defeated, he slumps off to go get his own breakfast. Daddy wins!
So I decide to come check e-mail, because I didn't get a call last night about Wifey getting in, so there's probably a note on e-mail. And what I received there simultaneously filled me with dread and delight:
"Dear Passenger,
Your 10:30 AM flight has been delayed until 2:35 PM. Because you will then miss your connecting flight, we have booked you on the following flight: 8:30-9:45. Thank you for your understanding."
The e-mail from Delta arrived at 10:45 PM. That's right: it came well after the plane left. Now, really, how can that possibly be of any use whatsoever? And, unless I missed my guess, given the time change it meant that Wifey (who goes to bed around 10 PM) was up until 4 AM her time trying to get to her destination.
Man, is she pissed. I'm sure flames are shooting out of her eyeballs. I'm only hoping she didn't strangle some airport person and end up getting hauled off to jail.
So why does this fill me with joy?
Duh! Because I'm not there, idiot! When your wife is in full-on Godzilla mode set on destroying everything and everyone around here, you don't want to be present!
Plus, I still owe her for the hex on the kitchen, the lack of coffee, and never telling me that this house is terrifying at night.
It's now 10 AM. Time to face the day.
How in the hell does she do it?
I'm laying in bed listening to all kinds of shit last night: heavy breathing, footsteps upstairs and downstairs, boards creaking, kids occasionally murmuring in their sleep, and noise from outside that was definitely some psychopath checking the windows to make sure they're locked.
But oh my God! I don't know how to lock the windows! Shit! What if she left one open? What if, right now, some seven-foot CHUDD-eating monstrosity is looming over me with a rusty chainsaw planning on sodomizing my vacant eye sockets as I scream for mercy?
So, in short, I kind of had trouble sleeping last night. Finally I drifted off into a fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep.
When I groggily came awake, I was pleased to find that my head cold, which had migrated to my vocal cords, had decided to come north for better climes and was back in my head. So I felt like crap.
Finally I dragged myself out of bed. I found the girl quickly, but the boy was nowhere to be see.
*whew* All that worrying for nothing! How could I forget that the monstrous evil infecting the house would go for the youngest kid first? Silly me.
So I was unrolling the fire ladder to go out the window (because I figured that, like Chucky, my zombified son waited downstairs to slaughter us with a cheese grater) when he pops up from under a pile of sheets and yells "BOO!"
I pissed my boxers.
Once we'd gotten everything cleaned up, and I'd threatened to murder him, we went downstairs for breakfast.
My head throbbing, I went for the one morning cure that solves everything: coffee.
I am the only coffee drinker in the house, and I only drink caffeinated coffee. It's not that I have anything against decaf, it's just that if I'm going to waste my time fiddling about heating water and mixing in coffee and whatnot, I want some kind of payoff.
Drinking decaf coffee is like being a lab rat trained to hit a button to not receive a pellet.
So I open up the coffee container and find that IT'S FREAKING EMPTY! I mean, really, is it so hard for Wifey to keep my coffee thing full for me? Apparently it is. But she doesn't care, because she's six hundred thousand miles away laying on a beach with some thong-clad muscle man massaging her toes.
First she curses the house, then she flushes my coffee down the toilet.
After a lot of rooting around, I found three different kinds of decaf tucked away in the cabinets. WTF? I guess those 120 mornings when she wakes up alone, she's making decaf coffee for somebody who isn't me.
We'll see who gets who with a cheese grater when she gets back, indeed.
Finally I came up with a stopgap solution (scraping enough coffee out of the empty container to make a lamentably weak brew that taunted you with its inefficacity) and made myself some coffee. I felt marginally better.
"What do you want for breakfast?" I ask the children.
"I want a special breakfast!" the Girl says. "Because mommy isn't here. Pwease?"
Sigh. Okay. So we rooted through the "special breakfast" stuf, and found Blueberry Cheescake muffin mix, which mommy hates. So we had a very special father/daughter bonding time making blueberry cheesecake muffins.
They boy, meanwhile, played his DS and ignored us fully.
When I bit into the first muffin, I remembered that Wifey wasn't the only one who didn't care for these things; they taske like lard with artificial blueberries in it. Ugh. But the girl liked them, so she ate mine, the boy's, and hers.
After breakfast, thwarted in my drive to defeat my cold with coffee, I decide to go with the other sure-fired cold cure. "I'm gonna take a shower," I said.
"What about my breakfast?" the boy asks.
"Get whatever you want," I say.
"But she got something special!" he says. "Why?"
"Uh," I didn't really have an answer for that.
"Because he loves me more, duh!" she says.
He starts to get mad at me when I cut him off. "Hey, only one of my children scared the piss out of me this morning!"
Defeated, he slumps off to go get his own breakfast. Daddy wins!
So I decide to come check e-mail, because I didn't get a call last night about Wifey getting in, so there's probably a note on e-mail. And what I received there simultaneously filled me with dread and delight:
"Dear Passenger,
Your 10:30 AM flight has been delayed until 2:35 PM. Because you will then miss your connecting flight, we have booked you on the following flight: 8:30-9:45. Thank you for your understanding."
The e-mail from Delta arrived at 10:45 PM. That's right: it came well after the plane left. Now, really, how can that possibly be of any use whatsoever? And, unless I missed my guess, given the time change it meant that Wifey (who goes to bed around 10 PM) was up until 4 AM her time trying to get to her destination.
Man, is she pissed. I'm sure flames are shooting out of her eyeballs. I'm only hoping she didn't strangle some airport person and end up getting hauled off to jail.
So why does this fill me with joy?
Duh! Because I'm not there, idiot! When your wife is in full-on Godzilla mode set on destroying everything and everyone around here, you don't want to be present!
Plus, I still owe her for the hex on the kitchen, the lack of coffee, and never telling me that this house is terrifying at night.
It's now 10 AM. Time to face the day.
Friday, November 6, 2009
One down, Ten to go
And so, dear reader, we reach the end of day 1. The children are in bed, I'm sitting down at the computer, and Wifey's…well, I'm not so sure where Wifey is. Probably on a beach getting suntan oil rubbed on her back or something.
Before she left, Wifey made this really complex menu for us, an exhaustive calendar of the children's activities, and a list of when her plants need to be watered.
(Quick note for any plantologists out there: does peeing on a plant count as watering it? Just let me know in the comments. Thanks!)
Personally, I admired her optimism.
"Are you sure you can handle this?" she said as we tearfully parted this morning at the airport.
"Pfft," I waved her off in disdain. "What could go wrong?"
I mean, come on: I outweigh the children by about a hundred pounds, I know both their names, and she gave me the bank card. Is some situation that I can't handle going to come up? I sincerely doubt it. I mean, I'm not Ward Cleaver or anything, but I'm certainly better than Homer Simpson.
So I hopped in my company car and drove to work, not even pausing to see if she could struggle the suitcase into the terminal. If she needs help, she'll hail a skycap or give up or something. For all I know she's gonna spend the next week hiding out in the Airport Sheraton or something.
(Digression: ironically enough, my company car is the car she uses, while I drive around in "her" car, because the car I bought for myself began hemorrhaging oil and had to be retired the same week I finally qualified for a company car. Let's hear it for dumb luck!)
At three, it was time to pick the little darlings up from school. So I zipped on over there, parked up near the football field, and made my way to the pickup room to get the boy (who, like a prisoner, must be paroled from school, unlike the girl, who wanders wild and free after school like a trustee with a weekend pass).
It was so dark that there were bats roosting in the light fixtures. A layer of dust had settled over everything. According to the clock on the wall, it was three thirty. But where were all the children?
After a bit of wandering around, I finally stumbled across a room with my child in it. I waved to him, and he didn't even acknowledge me before turning back to whatever it was he was working on over at the little table he was at.
I've been a father for nine years now, so I know exactly what the next step is: you go and noogie the child until he cries for mercy. And I was headed over to do exactly that when the room monitor, some little pencil-necked teacher's aide creep I'd never seen before in my entire life, stopped me.
"And who are you here to pick up?" he said, looking at me like I was some kind of kidnapper.
"That one," I said.
"Can I see your ID?" he asks me. So I flash the guy my ID. Take that, pencil-necked wannabe grown-up hall monitor!
"That's not you," he sniffed.
Oh, crap. Upon further review, it wasn’t me. It was Wifey's ID, since I'd just grabbed it out of my car, which is actually Wifey's car, while my proper ID was in her car, which is actually my car. So I tried to just play it off.
"But…you know her, right?" I asked. "I'm her husband. It's not like I jumped her in the parking lot and murdered her and stuffed her in the boot of the car and now I'm trying to pick up her children to sell them…"
Have you ever been about 30 words into a sentence and realized that what you just said was horribly inappropriate, verbalized in the wrong place, and overheard by six or seven strangers?
Yeah, me too.
So they're all looking at me and I pull my hands out of my pockets to prove that I'm not standing there "jingling my keys" or wearing those Freddy Kreuger razor gloves or whatever when the boy finally comes over.
"Okay dad," he says. "We can go now. I finished making you a paper gun. Here." And he hands me this paper gun that he's folded up. "See, I drawded some blood on the barrel just the way that you suggested, here and here," he says. "Where's mommy? Did you get rid of her already?"
"Let's just go," I say as everyone icily stares at me. "We've gotta go find your sister, okay?"
The teacher's aide squats down to talk to the boy. "You know, if you ever don't feel comfortable, you can always talk to a grownup here at the school. You know that, right?"
"Yeah," the boy says. "But daddy says if I don't feel comfortable I should just try to fart it out and as long as it doesn't stain my underwear there's no problem."
"What a delightful child," one of the women says as she stares daggers at me.
Oh, well, they were probably bitches anyways.
Then we went out into the playground to find the girl. Once I'd gotten ahold of her (easier said than done; she nearly knocked me over tackling me from behind) I got out of there ASAP.
When we got home, I checked the food schedule: pizza. Well, that could mean anything. For example, there could be frozen pizza, only I didn't find any. It could mean that I have to make pizza from a box, but that simply isn't going to happen. It could mean that I should order pizza, which sounds great.
Only, I just got over a cold, and whenever I have a head cold they always settle in my voice box and I can't talk right for two or three days. So I have this completely scratchy, bizarre voice. I couldn't order food on the phone in English, much less in the foreign language required to have anything here.
So I made the executive decision to damn the torpedoes and eat whatever we please for dinner later. The children, duped easily, quickly agreed. Freedom, thy name is bachelorhood!
But before dinner we have to go to their Friday activity, gymnastics. So I bundled them into the car and off we went to Little Gym. I, personally, couldn't wait. Every week they have a different theme at the gym, and this week is my personal favorite: pajama week.
As I always joke with Wifey, I keep hoping that one of the firm-bodied young instructor women will come to work in a tight little red negligee or something.
Sadly, this never happens. We have one instructor in flannel armor, a dude wearing swim trunks and a shirt, and a new girl that they've never had before wearing hot pink flannel pants.
Oh, well, better luck next year.
So the kids do their gymnastics thing, and I pull out my laptop to start writing this very post. And you know what? Battery's dead. So I get to watch the kids doing gymnastics.
And the only thing more boring than watching them do the same gymnastics routine I've seen for the past five years coached by a dude in swimtrunks and two refugees from the flannel factory is…I'll get back to you on that.
But of course, this week we had a big surprise in store for us: they were filming!
Yay! That means we get to go inside the big gymnastics room and watch the film! Oh, boy! Then spend several minutes watching the film of what we just saw! Hooray!
And do you know what the best part is? Do you?
I bet you don't!
This gym is used by children all week! In Europe! And it's Friday! And it's the last class of the day!
And it smells like a bunch of dirty Frenchmen had a rotten-egg food fight but were interrupted by some skunks and then the sanitation department buried them all in the refuse from a stinky cheese factory/papermill warehouse!
Oh boy!
I will admit that I don't know the Geneva Convention rules by heart, but I'm fairly certain my human rights were violated having to sit in that room and be assaulted by that smell.
Thankfully, mercifully, eventually the tape was over and we went home and immediately started making dinner, since we were all hungry. For the children, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and for daddy some microwave rice stuff that I love.
Being in a playful mood, I decided to play a joke on the boy. So I got out the strawberry jam to make his sandwich, then I threw a red plastic cup at him to make him think I'd thrown him the jam jar, so that when the cup bounced plastically off the floor he'd freak out and we'd all have a big laugh.
Instead, it hit him in the eye and he started swearing like a wounded pirate. His sister screamed, thinking the jelly was falling, and dove for it, knocking me to the ground and dropping the glass full of milk she was holding, shattering it everywhere and giving me a milk shower in the process.
I think there are glass shards in my underwear now.
After much crying and recriminations (and a not-so-satisfying dinner), we resolved never to go off-list again. Apparently mommy has cursed the house.
Before she left, Wifey made this really complex menu for us, an exhaustive calendar of the children's activities, and a list of when her plants need to be watered.
(Quick note for any plantologists out there: does peeing on a plant count as watering it? Just let me know in the comments. Thanks!)
Personally, I admired her optimism.
"Are you sure you can handle this?" she said as we tearfully parted this morning at the airport.
"Pfft," I waved her off in disdain. "What could go wrong?"
I mean, come on: I outweigh the children by about a hundred pounds, I know both their names, and she gave me the bank card. Is some situation that I can't handle going to come up? I sincerely doubt it. I mean, I'm not Ward Cleaver or anything, but I'm certainly better than Homer Simpson.
So I hopped in my company car and drove to work, not even pausing to see if she could struggle the suitcase into the terminal. If she needs help, she'll hail a skycap or give up or something. For all I know she's gonna spend the next week hiding out in the Airport Sheraton or something.
(Digression: ironically enough, my company car is the car she uses, while I drive around in "her" car, because the car I bought for myself began hemorrhaging oil and had to be retired the same week I finally qualified for a company car. Let's hear it for dumb luck!)
At three, it was time to pick the little darlings up from school. So I zipped on over there, parked up near the football field, and made my way to the pickup room to get the boy (who, like a prisoner, must be paroled from school, unlike the girl, who wanders wild and free after school like a trustee with a weekend pass).
It was so dark that there were bats roosting in the light fixtures. A layer of dust had settled over everything. According to the clock on the wall, it was three thirty. But where were all the children?
After a bit of wandering around, I finally stumbled across a room with my child in it. I waved to him, and he didn't even acknowledge me before turning back to whatever it was he was working on over at the little table he was at.
I've been a father for nine years now, so I know exactly what the next step is: you go and noogie the child until he cries for mercy. And I was headed over to do exactly that when the room monitor, some little pencil-necked teacher's aide creep I'd never seen before in my entire life, stopped me.
"And who are you here to pick up?" he said, looking at me like I was some kind of kidnapper.
"That one," I said.
"Can I see your ID?" he asks me. So I flash the guy my ID. Take that, pencil-necked wannabe grown-up hall monitor!
"That's not you," he sniffed.
Oh, crap. Upon further review, it wasn’t me. It was Wifey's ID, since I'd just grabbed it out of my car, which is actually Wifey's car, while my proper ID was in her car, which is actually my car. So I tried to just play it off.
"But…you know her, right?" I asked. "I'm her husband. It's not like I jumped her in the parking lot and murdered her and stuffed her in the boot of the car and now I'm trying to pick up her children to sell them…"
Have you ever been about 30 words into a sentence and realized that what you just said was horribly inappropriate, verbalized in the wrong place, and overheard by six or seven strangers?
Yeah, me too.
So they're all looking at me and I pull my hands out of my pockets to prove that I'm not standing there "jingling my keys" or wearing those Freddy Kreuger razor gloves or whatever when the boy finally comes over.
"Okay dad," he says. "We can go now. I finished making you a paper gun. Here." And he hands me this paper gun that he's folded up. "See, I drawded some blood on the barrel just the way that you suggested, here and here," he says. "Where's mommy? Did you get rid of her already?"
"Let's just go," I say as everyone icily stares at me. "We've gotta go find your sister, okay?"
The teacher's aide squats down to talk to the boy. "You know, if you ever don't feel comfortable, you can always talk to a grownup here at the school. You know that, right?"
"Yeah," the boy says. "But daddy says if I don't feel comfortable I should just try to fart it out and as long as it doesn't stain my underwear there's no problem."
"What a delightful child," one of the women says as she stares daggers at me.
Oh, well, they were probably bitches anyways.
Then we went out into the playground to find the girl. Once I'd gotten ahold of her (easier said than done; she nearly knocked me over tackling me from behind) I got out of there ASAP.
When we got home, I checked the food schedule: pizza. Well, that could mean anything. For example, there could be frozen pizza, only I didn't find any. It could mean that I have to make pizza from a box, but that simply isn't going to happen. It could mean that I should order pizza, which sounds great.
Only, I just got over a cold, and whenever I have a head cold they always settle in my voice box and I can't talk right for two or three days. So I have this completely scratchy, bizarre voice. I couldn't order food on the phone in English, much less in the foreign language required to have anything here.
So I made the executive decision to damn the torpedoes and eat whatever we please for dinner later. The children, duped easily, quickly agreed. Freedom, thy name is bachelorhood!
But before dinner we have to go to their Friday activity, gymnastics. So I bundled them into the car and off we went to Little Gym. I, personally, couldn't wait. Every week they have a different theme at the gym, and this week is my personal favorite: pajama week.
As I always joke with Wifey, I keep hoping that one of the firm-bodied young instructor women will come to work in a tight little red negligee or something.
Sadly, this never happens. We have one instructor in flannel armor, a dude wearing swim trunks and a shirt, and a new girl that they've never had before wearing hot pink flannel pants.
Oh, well, better luck next year.
So the kids do their gymnastics thing, and I pull out my laptop to start writing this very post. And you know what? Battery's dead. So I get to watch the kids doing gymnastics.
And the only thing more boring than watching them do the same gymnastics routine I've seen for the past five years coached by a dude in swimtrunks and two refugees from the flannel factory is…I'll get back to you on that.
But of course, this week we had a big surprise in store for us: they were filming!
Yay! That means we get to go inside the big gymnastics room and watch the film! Oh, boy! Then spend several minutes watching the film of what we just saw! Hooray!
And do you know what the best part is? Do you?
I bet you don't!
This gym is used by children all week! In Europe! And it's Friday! And it's the last class of the day!
And it smells like a bunch of dirty Frenchmen had a rotten-egg food fight but were interrupted by some skunks and then the sanitation department buried them all in the refuse from a stinky cheese factory/papermill warehouse!
Oh boy!
I will admit that I don't know the Geneva Convention rules by heart, but I'm fairly certain my human rights were violated having to sit in that room and be assaulted by that smell.
Thankfully, mercifully, eventually the tape was over and we went home and immediately started making dinner, since we were all hungry. For the children, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and for daddy some microwave rice stuff that I love.
Being in a playful mood, I decided to play a joke on the boy. So I got out the strawberry jam to make his sandwich, then I threw a red plastic cup at him to make him think I'd thrown him the jam jar, so that when the cup bounced plastically off the floor he'd freak out and we'd all have a big laugh.
Instead, it hit him in the eye and he started swearing like a wounded pirate. His sister screamed, thinking the jelly was falling, and dove for it, knocking me to the ground and dropping the glass full of milk she was holding, shattering it everywhere and giving me a milk shower in the process.
I think there are glass shards in my underwear now.
After much crying and recriminations (and a not-so-satisfying dinner), we resolved never to go off-list again. Apparently mommy has cursed the house.
Home Alone
Earlier this year, despite the gloomy economic climate and my general worthlessness as an employee, my company offered me a contract extension to remain overseas for a few more years, and I accepted. That evening, I came home and told Wifey the good news.
"Guess what? I got a three-year extension! We're staying, baby!"
I knew there would be trouble when she said to me, "You know, I agreed to come over here for three years, and now you've signed an extension to keep me here for eight. I'm starting to feel like I was lied to."
So, sometime later, I was presented with a list of demands, eight things that she said were absolutely required for her to be happy over the term of the extension.
Like any good husband, I knew that only half the list really mattered. See, if I did all of them, then she'd just think up more stuff. If I didn't do any of them, there'd be hell to pay. If I did half of them, though, I'd have some bargaining chips when my company offers me another extension in three more years.
But the trick is that I needed to figure out which half of the things were important, and do those, and then ignore the other stuff.
Based on the age-old adage that there's no such thing as a stupid question, I decided simply to ask her "Any chance you'll tell me which of these are important and which ones I can ignore? 'Cause this list is kind of long."
Based on the dick punch I quickly received, the age-old adage is, at best, misleading.
But being a clever husband, I honed in like a laser-beam on the ones that I thought were probably important. Well, after I could focus my vision again I did.
The first item was easy: BUY SOME ANTIQUES. I figured she'd find it a pleasant surprise if I resolved one item immediately, so the day after getting the list I nicked on down to the second-day-bread store, purchased a loaf of week-old rum raisin loaf, and that was that. Because when bread ages past its sell date, it's an antique, right?
Based on the dick punch I received, though, she didn't mean it in quite that fashion.
So I pawned the kids off on a friend, took her off on a whirlwind tour of an antique store, bought something really old and probably too expensive, and crossed the first item off the list.
Advantage: Plebian!
The second item on her list was also easy: GET MORE STORAGE SPACE IN THE GARAGE. So I loaded the family into the car and went to Ikea, since they're full of stuff that you can easily construct to store the mountains of crap that fills up your garage and turns your house into a fire hazard.
At least, Ikeas in a normal country are like that. Our local Ikea was, sadly, lacking in any shelf stuff. They had all the six-inch-high beds you could ever want, though, just in case you've got some deep-seated desire to sleep very close to the floor.
So we ended up going to Brico, which is what K-Mart would be if it were run by Lawn Gnomes dedicated to slaughtering all of humanity by selling them dangerous and difficult-to-assemble items from inside a warehouse that smells like pee.
Okay, the "smells like pee" part K-Mart already has down, but you get the point. Miraculously, though, we found two incredibly heavy metal shelves that would do the trick, and I got them loaded into the car with only a partial hernia.
We got them home, and quickly I had not only assembled them but I'd cut my thumb from webbing to nail via this cool spiral that bled profusely enough that one shelf is known as "daddy's extra digit."
But they're up, the garage is neater than it ever has been, and another item was crossed off the list.
Advantage: Plebian, again!
The third item on the list was so laughable that when I saw it, I thought for a moment that it was some trick on her part to lull me into a false sense of security. But no, there it was: TRIM THE *@$&! TREE!!!
This combined two of my passions: using an obscure tool and destroying stuff. I practically raced out of the house when I saw this one with my long-handed overhead tree saw in hand. Ten minutes later I'd practically denuded the darn thing. No dick punch even necessary!
When I got back inside, I grinned at her. "I don't know why I never did that before," I said. "That was pretty fun!"
Note to self: after Wifey complains about something for three years, when you finally resolve it, don't admit that it wasn't a pain, or you might get a dick punch.
If you're keeping track at home, once I could stand and breathe under my own power, the score was now Plebian 3, Wifey 0.
The fourth item, though, brought me up short with a feeling of dread in my stomach: FIX OUTSIDE LIGHT.
Listen, I've done a little wiring in the house. But I draw the line at fiddling around outside on a ladder in a country where it rains 98% of the time. So there's no way I was touching that one.
On to the fifth item: MORE QUALITY TIME TOGETHER.
"You mean naked quality time, or quality time like doing stuff with our clothes on?"
She just raised an eyebrow at me, so I went on to item six: WIRELESS INTERNET IN THE HOUSE.
WTF? What am I, the Verizon guy? I couldn't hook up wireless internet if my life depended on it. I'm also half afraid that the radiation from a wireless in-home network might cause lupus, or erectile dysfunction, which is probably what she wants anyways because I'm hung like a donkey on Viagra.
So I skipped on to item seven: BIGGER HOT WATER HEATER.
Yeah, not in a rented house, babe. I'll tell you what: as long as I'm upping the property value for the landlord, why don't I build on an extension and install a Jacuzzi?
So I finally arrived at item eight: GET STUFF FROM STORAGE LOCKER.
Now, if you read our vacation odyssey from two years ago, you might remember our trip to the Storage Locker of Doom. And you might recall Wifey's reaction to seeing the stuff in there . And you might recall my joy.
Apparently, though, this has worn off, because there are some "things" she wants from storage. I don't know what, and I don't want to know what. It's enough to realize that unless I want to risk irradiation, raise the property value of my rented house, or become a better husband, this is pretty much my last option.
Oh, sure, I could let her cash in my life insurance by electrocuting myself on the front step fiddling with the driveway light, but I'm not running for super-husband here. And I don't even park in the driveway, either, she does.
However, a devious plan formed in my mind: you know, if I were to arrange it so that Wifey went to the storage locker, leaving me behind, then she would have to fulfill this item on her list.
So I'd get one item off the list for free without having to do anything at all!
As you can imagine, that cinched the deal for me: storage locker here she comes!
I marched straight into my bosses' office six weeks later (hey, like I said, I'm not running for super husband) and presented it to him like this:
"Now that I'm gonna be here for eight years instead of three, is there any chance that my wife could go get some stuff out of our storage locker and have it shipped here?"
"Sure," he says. "We want her to be happy, you know."
When I repeated that to Wifey, her reaction was classic:
"Shit. If I'd known that, I'd have asked for more."
Oh, well. Live and learn, Wifey!
So this morning, I loaded Wifey onto a plane bound for America. Now it's just me and the kids for ten whole days while she works like a galley slave to cross an item off her own list.
Game, set, and match to Plebian!
Unless something goes wrong while I'm totally alone with the kids without Wifey, who typically takes care of managing them and is the only one in the house who knows where everything is and is the only one who can ever manage our son without getting so frustrated that she wants to break something over his head or swallow poison, whichever is closer at hand. Oh, and did I mention that the Girl is worried that she's about to start puberty and has already told me that she misses her "girl talks" with mommy and might have to have one with me?
I'm beginning to think there was a hole in my plan. And I'm right royally screwed if she doesn't come back in ten days.
I'll keep you (and Wifey, if she thinks to read the blog) updated on our progress…
"Guess what? I got a three-year extension! We're staying, baby!"
I knew there would be trouble when she said to me, "You know, I agreed to come over here for three years, and now you've signed an extension to keep me here for eight. I'm starting to feel like I was lied to."
So, sometime later, I was presented with a list of demands, eight things that she said were absolutely required for her to be happy over the term of the extension.
Like any good husband, I knew that only half the list really mattered. See, if I did all of them, then she'd just think up more stuff. If I didn't do any of them, there'd be hell to pay. If I did half of them, though, I'd have some bargaining chips when my company offers me another extension in three more years.
But the trick is that I needed to figure out which half of the things were important, and do those, and then ignore the other stuff.
Based on the age-old adage that there's no such thing as a stupid question, I decided simply to ask her "Any chance you'll tell me which of these are important and which ones I can ignore? 'Cause this list is kind of long."
Based on the dick punch I quickly received, the age-old adage is, at best, misleading.
But being a clever husband, I honed in like a laser-beam on the ones that I thought were probably important. Well, after I could focus my vision again I did.
The first item was easy: BUY SOME ANTIQUES. I figured she'd find it a pleasant surprise if I resolved one item immediately, so the day after getting the list I nicked on down to the second-day-bread store, purchased a loaf of week-old rum raisin loaf, and that was that. Because when bread ages past its sell date, it's an antique, right?
Based on the dick punch I received, though, she didn't mean it in quite that fashion.
So I pawned the kids off on a friend, took her off on a whirlwind tour of an antique store, bought something really old and probably too expensive, and crossed the first item off the list.
Advantage: Plebian!
The second item on her list was also easy: GET MORE STORAGE SPACE IN THE GARAGE. So I loaded the family into the car and went to Ikea, since they're full of stuff that you can easily construct to store the mountains of crap that fills up your garage and turns your house into a fire hazard.
At least, Ikeas in a normal country are like that. Our local Ikea was, sadly, lacking in any shelf stuff. They had all the six-inch-high beds you could ever want, though, just in case you've got some deep-seated desire to sleep very close to the floor.
So we ended up going to Brico, which is what K-Mart would be if it were run by Lawn Gnomes dedicated to slaughtering all of humanity by selling them dangerous and difficult-to-assemble items from inside a warehouse that smells like pee.
Okay, the "smells like pee" part K-Mart already has down, but you get the point. Miraculously, though, we found two incredibly heavy metal shelves that would do the trick, and I got them loaded into the car with only a partial hernia.
We got them home, and quickly I had not only assembled them but I'd cut my thumb from webbing to nail via this cool spiral that bled profusely enough that one shelf is known as "daddy's extra digit."
But they're up, the garage is neater than it ever has been, and another item was crossed off the list.
Advantage: Plebian, again!
The third item on the list was so laughable that when I saw it, I thought for a moment that it was some trick on her part to lull me into a false sense of security. But no, there it was: TRIM THE *@$&! TREE!!!
This combined two of my passions: using an obscure tool and destroying stuff. I practically raced out of the house when I saw this one with my long-handed overhead tree saw in hand. Ten minutes later I'd practically denuded the darn thing. No dick punch even necessary!
When I got back inside, I grinned at her. "I don't know why I never did that before," I said. "That was pretty fun!"
Note to self: after Wifey complains about something for three years, when you finally resolve it, don't admit that it wasn't a pain, or you might get a dick punch.
If you're keeping track at home, once I could stand and breathe under my own power, the score was now Plebian 3, Wifey 0.
The fourth item, though, brought me up short with a feeling of dread in my stomach: FIX OUTSIDE LIGHT.
Listen, I've done a little wiring in the house. But I draw the line at fiddling around outside on a ladder in a country where it rains 98% of the time. So there's no way I was touching that one.
On to the fifth item: MORE QUALITY TIME TOGETHER.
"You mean naked quality time, or quality time like doing stuff with our clothes on?"
She just raised an eyebrow at me, so I went on to item six: WIRELESS INTERNET IN THE HOUSE.
WTF? What am I, the Verizon guy? I couldn't hook up wireless internet if my life depended on it. I'm also half afraid that the radiation from a wireless in-home network might cause lupus, or erectile dysfunction, which is probably what she wants anyways because I'm hung like a donkey on Viagra.
So I skipped on to item seven: BIGGER HOT WATER HEATER.
Yeah, not in a rented house, babe. I'll tell you what: as long as I'm upping the property value for the landlord, why don't I build on an extension and install a Jacuzzi?
So I finally arrived at item eight: GET STUFF FROM STORAGE LOCKER.
Now, if you read our vacation odyssey from two years ago, you might remember our trip to the Storage Locker of Doom. And you might recall Wifey's reaction to seeing the stuff in there . And you might recall my joy.
Apparently, though, this has worn off, because there are some "things" she wants from storage. I don't know what, and I don't want to know what. It's enough to realize that unless I want to risk irradiation, raise the property value of my rented house, or become a better husband, this is pretty much my last option.
Oh, sure, I could let her cash in my life insurance by electrocuting myself on the front step fiddling with the driveway light, but I'm not running for super-husband here. And I don't even park in the driveway, either, she does.
However, a devious plan formed in my mind: you know, if I were to arrange it so that Wifey went to the storage locker, leaving me behind, then she would have to fulfill this item on her list.
So I'd get one item off the list for free without having to do anything at all!
As you can imagine, that cinched the deal for me: storage locker here she comes!
I marched straight into my bosses' office six weeks later (hey, like I said, I'm not running for super husband) and presented it to him like this:
"Now that I'm gonna be here for eight years instead of three, is there any chance that my wife could go get some stuff out of our storage locker and have it shipped here?"
"Sure," he says. "We want her to be happy, you know."
When I repeated that to Wifey, her reaction was classic:
"Shit. If I'd known that, I'd have asked for more."
Oh, well. Live and learn, Wifey!
So this morning, I loaded Wifey onto a plane bound for America. Now it's just me and the kids for ten whole days while she works like a galley slave to cross an item off her own list.
Game, set, and match to Plebian!
Unless something goes wrong while I'm totally alone with the kids without Wifey, who typically takes care of managing them and is the only one in the house who knows where everything is and is the only one who can ever manage our son without getting so frustrated that she wants to break something over his head or swallow poison, whichever is closer at hand. Oh, and did I mention that the Girl is worried that she's about to start puberty and has already told me that she misses her "girl talks" with mommy and might have to have one with me?
I'm beginning to think there was a hole in my plan. And I'm right royally screwed if she doesn't come back in ten days.
I'll keep you (and Wifey, if she thinks to read the blog) updated on our progress…
Back to normal
Okay, so we're going to go back to the satire/humor angle I'm used to working, starting with the next post. That last one was kind of an aberration, see. It's not like I'm wise, or thoughtful, or even very bright.
And for all those of you who have been pining away for another of Plebian's Seria Adventures, it's time once again!
And for all those of you who have been pining away for another of Plebian's Seria Adventures, it's time once again!
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Rope a dope?
So I'm reading American Lion, the biography of Andrew Jackson. As a Tennesseean, I have always loved Jackson. He's basically the only TN president worth a damn (the others are Johnson, famous for being impeached, and Polk, famous for, uh, having a name very close to a common meat product).
What I've always loved about Jackson is this: when he lost the election of 1824, he believed he'd been screwed in a backdoor deal by Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, with Clay taking the Secretary of State under President Adams in return for throwing his support to Adams. This all despite Jackson having won the popular vote.
So Jackson did what any clever politician would do: he spent the next four years criticizing the administration, decrying the corrupt bargain that had defied the will of the people, and worked his way into the public imagination as their savior.
He won the 1828 election, unseating Adams and causing a furor.
When he took office, the Washington insiders were horrified. They despised him. Some of them opposed Jackson on everything on the grounds that if Jackson wanted it, it must be wrong.
Despite all this, Jackson remained popular with the people and, more often than not, got what he wanted done.
I find this interesting because we've only ever seen this strategy used once in the past forty years, when Reagan kept himself in the public eye after losing to Ford in 1976 to re-emerge four years later as the "people's champion" in the 1980 election. And Reagan, as you may know, ended up with a successful (in his eyes) presidency.
In 2000, Al Gore could have used this strategy. If he'd simply conceded, kept himself pushed forward as a stern critic of George Bush, and not gotten distracted lecturing about global warming, I'm convinced he'd have easily cruised to victory in 2004. But for some reason, Gore didn't do this. How he could miss this strategy, coming as it does from the founder of the Democratic party and a president from his home state, always perplexed me.
I wonder, though, if this isn't the place that Sarah Palin is carving out for herself. She certainly seems to be in the heads of the establishment, which despises her. She's clearly set herself forward as an opposition voice to the Democratic Party and President Obama. She seems to be making her case directly to the people, as Jackson once did.
She can leap upon every misstep by the President, every error by his cabinet, every unfortunate incident, and use it as a club against them and then explain how much better she would do. And with no real duties of her own to perform, there is nothing to yell back at her except insults, which rarely resonate well outside of partisans.
Witness the power of her "death panels" attack. She says it, the Democrats go apoplectic, and finally they end up changing the provision. Whether it's a fair attack or not, or a fair comment, a woman who is essentially a private citizen riled up the entire Democratic party and forced a change in a proposed bill.
That's more power than actual elected Republican congressmen have.
She has set herself up to spend the next three years as an optimist, explaining how it could be done better, while her opponents must explain poor performance(bad) or embrace failure(worse). That, to me, sounds very much like a hybrid Jackson/Reagan strategy.
I'm not saying that Palin's destined to be president. I'm saying that, at the current time, she certainly seems to be running a better strategy than any that's been deployed since Reagan lost his challenge to unseat Ford.
And that may explain a lot of the hair-tearing that surrounds her by Democrats.
Can this strategy be defused? Certainly. Here are four ways Obama could cut her off at the pass:
1) It's the economy, stupid: tomorrow, appear on TV and say a variation of the following: "My fellow Americans, let me be clear: the economy is our top priority. Starting from today, November 6th, my administration is pushing every other issue to the back burner until the suffering from this global recession has abated. We may have inherited the problem, but that won't keep us from creating the solution. Yes we can!"
Then, enforce ruthless message discipline: we don't talk any more about health care, or card check, or cap-and-trade, until unemployment is dropping and the economy has clearly recovered. So long as something else is atop the agenda, the American people assume (rightly) that the President and the Democrats don't care that the economy's in the tank.
Go on TV every week and talk up the economy. Livestream it over the internet. Call it a monitor-side chat. FDR would be proud.
This, incidentally, sank the first Bush and elevated Clinton. So it's inexcusable for them not to know this.
2) Ignore the critics, say nothing, and then repeat: it's maddening that a gifted campaigner, who has the media stepping atop one another to defend him, feels the need to crouch down to take pot shots at radio personalities and former governors. There's an old adage about getting in a pissing match: always piss up. When you're president, you can't piss up! So don't get in pissing matches, morons!
This goes for his surrogates, too. When David Axelrod whines about Rush Limbaugh, it elevates Limbaugh. The recent hand-wringing over Limbaugh's commentary makes me laugh: who is it that elevated Limbaugh to the President's level? It wasn't Limbaugh; it was the President himself by getting cheesed off over the infamous "I hope he fails" line.
When Reagan re-ran for election in 1984, Mondale desperately wanted to debate him. Reagan, with a monstrous lead, wouldn't have it. Why give Mondale's campaign any oxygen, when ignoring it was all that was required to win? So this is what Reagan did, unable to hear Reporters asking "why won't you debate?" because of the helicopters.
Reagan wins in a landslide. Why is Obama pumping pure oxygen to Sarah Palin?
3) Laugh and the world laughs with you: For me, candidate Obama's greatest moment in the campaign was when he was asked what his greatest fault was at a debate, and he said he had a messy desk. The other two candidates (Clinton and Edwards, if memory serves) answered after him and gave the typical "sometimes I care so much it keeps me up at night" answers.
After the debate, Obama joked that if he'd known the answers were supposed to be like that, then he'd have said that his greatest fault was that sometimes he went out of his way to help old ladies across the street (or something to that effect). It was funny. It was human. It made us like this guy who, like us, thought that a lot of this political stuff was phony and stupid.
Where did that guy go? I'm not asking for a comedian as a president, but the dour, stern-faced, angry president who sends on-air corrections and runs a White House tipline is a fary cry from the one who could laugh at himself eighteen months ago.
4) Remember whose shoes you fill: President Obama. Until 2012 (and perhaps beyond) he is our President. The office is worthy of respect, regardless of the man (or woman, someday) who fills it. It's the office that was filled by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and other bold, visionary men who, for better or worse, changed this country and its people.
It was also filled by William Henry Harrison, James Buchanen, Jimmy Carter, and other men who are better forgotten than regretted.
But at all times the President should carry himself with dignity. He should be wary of expending the dignity of his office in political pursuit. He should treat other heads of state with respect and dignity, regardless of his personal feelings. Our President should succeed at those things to which he turns his hand, because he is our President.
He should represent all of us, not some of us, and he should never apologize that we exist, nor grovel in the face of other nations. Just as we would not grovel to him, nor should he ever expect us to.
Clinton did not let himself be made a fool of on the international stage by prostituting his office in a vain (and fruitless) civic pursuit. Monroe, in the infancy of our nation, told the Europeans that they were not welcome here, and that they should look elsewhere for colonies, instead of groveling before them and begging their forebearance.
Our President should never bow, nor kiss a ring, nor show any obesiance to any other ruler or potentate on all this planet. We are a free people, and he is our leader.
President Obama needs to remember this: carry himself with dignity. Let a mayor throw out the first pitches, and let a governor campaign. Let an assemblyman harangue policemen.
The President has more important things to do.
What I've always loved about Jackson is this: when he lost the election of 1824, he believed he'd been screwed in a backdoor deal by Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, with Clay taking the Secretary of State under President Adams in return for throwing his support to Adams. This all despite Jackson having won the popular vote.
So Jackson did what any clever politician would do: he spent the next four years criticizing the administration, decrying the corrupt bargain that had defied the will of the people, and worked his way into the public imagination as their savior.
He won the 1828 election, unseating Adams and causing a furor.
When he took office, the Washington insiders were horrified. They despised him. Some of them opposed Jackson on everything on the grounds that if Jackson wanted it, it must be wrong.
Despite all this, Jackson remained popular with the people and, more often than not, got what he wanted done.
I find this interesting because we've only ever seen this strategy used once in the past forty years, when Reagan kept himself in the public eye after losing to Ford in 1976 to re-emerge four years later as the "people's champion" in the 1980 election. And Reagan, as you may know, ended up with a successful (in his eyes) presidency.
In 2000, Al Gore could have used this strategy. If he'd simply conceded, kept himself pushed forward as a stern critic of George Bush, and not gotten distracted lecturing about global warming, I'm convinced he'd have easily cruised to victory in 2004. But for some reason, Gore didn't do this. How he could miss this strategy, coming as it does from the founder of the Democratic party and a president from his home state, always perplexed me.
I wonder, though, if this isn't the place that Sarah Palin is carving out for herself. She certainly seems to be in the heads of the establishment, which despises her. She's clearly set herself forward as an opposition voice to the Democratic Party and President Obama. She seems to be making her case directly to the people, as Jackson once did.
She can leap upon every misstep by the President, every error by his cabinet, every unfortunate incident, and use it as a club against them and then explain how much better she would do. And with no real duties of her own to perform, there is nothing to yell back at her except insults, which rarely resonate well outside of partisans.
Witness the power of her "death panels" attack. She says it, the Democrats go apoplectic, and finally they end up changing the provision. Whether it's a fair attack or not, or a fair comment, a woman who is essentially a private citizen riled up the entire Democratic party and forced a change in a proposed bill.
That's more power than actual elected Republican congressmen have.
She has set herself up to spend the next three years as an optimist, explaining how it could be done better, while her opponents must explain poor performance(bad) or embrace failure(worse). That, to me, sounds very much like a hybrid Jackson/Reagan strategy.
I'm not saying that Palin's destined to be president. I'm saying that, at the current time, she certainly seems to be running a better strategy than any that's been deployed since Reagan lost his challenge to unseat Ford.
And that may explain a lot of the hair-tearing that surrounds her by Democrats.
Can this strategy be defused? Certainly. Here are four ways Obama could cut her off at the pass:
1) It's the economy, stupid: tomorrow, appear on TV and say a variation of the following: "My fellow Americans, let me be clear: the economy is our top priority. Starting from today, November 6th, my administration is pushing every other issue to the back burner until the suffering from this global recession has abated. We may have inherited the problem, but that won't keep us from creating the solution. Yes we can!"
Then, enforce ruthless message discipline: we don't talk any more about health care, or card check, or cap-and-trade, until unemployment is dropping and the economy has clearly recovered. So long as something else is atop the agenda, the American people assume (rightly) that the President and the Democrats don't care that the economy's in the tank.
Go on TV every week and talk up the economy. Livestream it over the internet. Call it a monitor-side chat. FDR would be proud.
This, incidentally, sank the first Bush and elevated Clinton. So it's inexcusable for them not to know this.
2) Ignore the critics, say nothing, and then repeat: it's maddening that a gifted campaigner, who has the media stepping atop one another to defend him, feels the need to crouch down to take pot shots at radio personalities and former governors. There's an old adage about getting in a pissing match: always piss up. When you're president, you can't piss up! So don't get in pissing matches, morons!
This goes for his surrogates, too. When David Axelrod whines about Rush Limbaugh, it elevates Limbaugh. The recent hand-wringing over Limbaugh's commentary makes me laugh: who is it that elevated Limbaugh to the President's level? It wasn't Limbaugh; it was the President himself by getting cheesed off over the infamous "I hope he fails" line.
When Reagan re-ran for election in 1984, Mondale desperately wanted to debate him. Reagan, with a monstrous lead, wouldn't have it. Why give Mondale's campaign any oxygen, when ignoring it was all that was required to win? So this is what Reagan did, unable to hear Reporters asking "why won't you debate?" because of the helicopters.
Reagan wins in a landslide. Why is Obama pumping pure oxygen to Sarah Palin?
3) Laugh and the world laughs with you: For me, candidate Obama's greatest moment in the campaign was when he was asked what his greatest fault was at a debate, and he said he had a messy desk. The other two candidates (Clinton and Edwards, if memory serves) answered after him and gave the typical "sometimes I care so much it keeps me up at night" answers.
After the debate, Obama joked that if he'd known the answers were supposed to be like that, then he'd have said that his greatest fault was that sometimes he went out of his way to help old ladies across the street (or something to that effect). It was funny. It was human. It made us like this guy who, like us, thought that a lot of this political stuff was phony and stupid.
Where did that guy go? I'm not asking for a comedian as a president, but the dour, stern-faced, angry president who sends on-air corrections and runs a White House tipline is a fary cry from the one who could laugh at himself eighteen months ago.
4) Remember whose shoes you fill: President Obama. Until 2012 (and perhaps beyond) he is our President. The office is worthy of respect, regardless of the man (or woman, someday) who fills it. It's the office that was filled by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and other bold, visionary men who, for better or worse, changed this country and its people.
It was also filled by William Henry Harrison, James Buchanen, Jimmy Carter, and other men who are better forgotten than regretted.
But at all times the President should carry himself with dignity. He should be wary of expending the dignity of his office in political pursuit. He should treat other heads of state with respect and dignity, regardless of his personal feelings. Our President should succeed at those things to which he turns his hand, because he is our President.
He should represent all of us, not some of us, and he should never apologize that we exist, nor grovel in the face of other nations. Just as we would not grovel to him, nor should he ever expect us to.
Clinton did not let himself be made a fool of on the international stage by prostituting his office in a vain (and fruitless) civic pursuit. Monroe, in the infancy of our nation, told the Europeans that they were not welcome here, and that they should look elsewhere for colonies, instead of groveling before them and begging their forebearance.
Our President should never bow, nor kiss a ring, nor show any obesiance to any other ruler or potentate on all this planet. We are a free people, and he is our leader.
President Obama needs to remember this: carry himself with dignity. Let a mayor throw out the first pitches, and let a governor campaign. Let an assemblyman harangue policemen.
The President has more important things to do.
So, yeah, it's been a while
Yeah, yeah, I know; it's been a while. A long while. I've been rather swamped at work. On the one hand, this is a good thing: the whole global recession hasn't really impacted me at all. On the other hand, it pretty much killed off my blog.
But, I got an e-mail asking me, basically, "where the heck did you go?" And I see that I have two followers despite not having posted in many months (which is comparable to having two interregnums and forty Italian parliaments in real time).
So I'll post twice today, because inspiration struck me earlier today. And this counts as a post. Honest, it does.
Yeah, that'll make up for it.
But, I got an e-mail asking me, basically, "where the heck did you go?" And I see that I have two followers despite not having posted in many months (which is comparable to having two interregnums and forty Italian parliaments in real time).
So I'll post twice today, because inspiration struck me earlier today. And this counts as a post. Honest, it does.
Yeah, that'll make up for it.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Through the Looking Glass
While others waste their time conspiracy-mongering about the Obama birth certificate, a great and hideous cabal works its nefarious will to alter the United States in ways we cannot possibly imagine, spearheaded by the Republican arch villain Karl Rove.
I speak, of course, about the ongoing efforts to sell southern California to China, which is happening under our noses and with the express written consent of the NFL.
When I tell people about this conspiracy, they inevitably pass through three phases: disbelief, followed by ridicule, and finally spittle-flecked outrage at this plan.
Read on and prepare your salivary glands, my friends.
Here are the facts:
California is impoverished, and is in fact paying bills by sending misspelled IOUs written on used cocktail napkins that have been coated in the Ebola virus in an attempt to either discredit or slay their creditors.
California’s Republican governor is a foreigner famous for having come from a communist country in the east.
The US is deeply indebted to China, and is taking on more and more debt every day to fund Obama’s lavish plans to socialize everything from health care to underwear (or didn’t you read the Boxer-Reid bill ‘Fruit of the Loom Relief Act of 2009’?).
Sarah Palin is doing everything in her power (faking pregnancies, resigning as governor, and even giving lapdances to Bigfeet) in an attempt to draw public attention northwards on orders of her Rovian master.
Obama is a lousy sportsman and has long harbored an intense disdain for surfing, ever since a group of surfers beat him up in junior high school, which is why he encouraged North Korea to nuke his home state of Hawaii (plot only foiled by the timely intervention of Kim Jong-Il’s bout of Explosive Flatulence). With southern Cal out of the way, there will be no surfing enclaves left.
No NFL teams of note reside in southern California, and the NFL is desperate to go global despite the obvious barriers to playing football outside of the US, most notably the rampant mental deficiencies in other cultures that make them enjoy soccer (which is erroneously translated as football in most other languages).
Obama’s secretary of state has close contacts with numerous Chinese officials and previously helped sell them other important US landmarks, such as the White House.
The Chinese recently toured Southern California with a torch to check it out, not unlike a prospective homeowner looking in the crawl space of a property with a flashlight. Before you scoff, remember that in many third-world countries a torch is just like a flashlight, and San Francisco is very much like a crawl space, only it smells worse.
At this point, as the spittle collects in the corner of your mouth, you might be wondering why Karl Rove wants to carve Chinafornia out of the southernmost part of the Golden State. The reason is quite simple: to create a permanent Republican majority. With those leftists gathered on the southern part of the state now getting what they deserve (re: communist enslavement), the northern part of the state will swing right and suddenly the guaranteed 55 Electoral College votes for the Democrats will disappear.
Illegal immigrants from Mexico will now be China’s problem, not ours. China will likely handle them in the respectful, humane way that they handle other problems, which will satisfy Rove’s dark thirst for blood.
Even the Democrats gain something, which is why they are supporting this vile effort: they’ll be rid of Nancy Pelosi.
I speak, of course, about the ongoing efforts to sell southern California to China, which is happening under our noses and with the express written consent of the NFL.
When I tell people about this conspiracy, they inevitably pass through three phases: disbelief, followed by ridicule, and finally spittle-flecked outrage at this plan.
Read on and prepare your salivary glands, my friends.
Here are the facts:
California is impoverished, and is in fact paying bills by sending misspelled IOUs written on used cocktail napkins that have been coated in the Ebola virus in an attempt to either discredit or slay their creditors.
California’s Republican governor is a foreigner famous for having come from a communist country in the east.
The US is deeply indebted to China, and is taking on more and more debt every day to fund Obama’s lavish plans to socialize everything from health care to underwear (or didn’t you read the Boxer-Reid bill ‘Fruit of the Loom Relief Act of 2009’?).
Sarah Palin is doing everything in her power (faking pregnancies, resigning as governor, and even giving lapdances to Bigfeet) in an attempt to draw public attention northwards on orders of her Rovian master.
Obama is a lousy sportsman and has long harbored an intense disdain for surfing, ever since a group of surfers beat him up in junior high school, which is why he encouraged North Korea to nuke his home state of Hawaii (plot only foiled by the timely intervention of Kim Jong-Il’s bout of Explosive Flatulence). With southern Cal out of the way, there will be no surfing enclaves left.
No NFL teams of note reside in southern California, and the NFL is desperate to go global despite the obvious barriers to playing football outside of the US, most notably the rampant mental deficiencies in other cultures that make them enjoy soccer (which is erroneously translated as football in most other languages).
Obama’s secretary of state has close contacts with numerous Chinese officials and previously helped sell them other important US landmarks, such as the White House.
The Chinese recently toured Southern California with a torch to check it out, not unlike a prospective homeowner looking in the crawl space of a property with a flashlight. Before you scoff, remember that in many third-world countries a torch is just like a flashlight, and San Francisco is very much like a crawl space, only it smells worse.
At this point, as the spittle collects in the corner of your mouth, you might be wondering why Karl Rove wants to carve Chinafornia out of the southernmost part of the Golden State. The reason is quite simple: to create a permanent Republican majority. With those leftists gathered on the southern part of the state now getting what they deserve (re: communist enslavement), the northern part of the state will swing right and suddenly the guaranteed 55 Electoral College votes for the Democrats will disappear.
Illegal immigrants from Mexico will now be China’s problem, not ours. China will likely handle them in the respectful, humane way that they handle other problems, which will satisfy Rove’s dark thirst for blood.
Even the Democrats gain something, which is why they are supporting this vile effort: they’ll be rid of Nancy Pelosi.
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