Another Reason I Should Probably Get a Smart Phone

When my son asked me if a tyrannosaurus rex could bite its own tongue, I wanted to give my boilerplate answer to ridiculous kid questions, which is "That's a really good question, but I don't know the answer -- why don't you look it up on the computer, and then tell me what you find" but we were on a long car ride, so I had to pause my podcast and discuss dinosaur tongues for twenty minutes, and this may be reason enough for me to break down and get a smart phone for our cross country trip this summer.

Slow Ride From Billings to Lincoln (But Worth It)

Nebraska is slow-paced and laconic, but don't let that put you off -- it's an awesome movie: funny, entertaining, and full of arresting imagery and faces that you don't usually see on a big screen; my favorite line is when Bruce Dern, playing Woody the senile alcoholic dad in search of a specious million dollar sweepstakes prize, slips away from his son to the bar . . . when his son attempts to drag him out of the joint, Woody claims "beer ain't drinking."

Will the Streak Continue? Let's Hope Not . . .

My son Ian has come so close to good behavior at school the past two weeks -- both weeks he had good days Monday through Thursday, but both weeks his teacher sent a note home on Friday, and both notes detailed an "f-word" violation; two weeks ago he wrote the f-word on another student's notebook (he claims he was dared, not exactly a great defense) and last week he said the f-word in music class when a fellow third grader "lied about him and left him out" and while this is quite an impressive streak, I'm really hoping it doesn't continue, and I'm wondering if I should pull him out of school this Friday to break the juju.

The Interestings is Interesting

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, details the lives of a group of friends that meet as teenagers at an artsy summer camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods; the novel has a Joyce Carol Oates type feel -- Wolitzer is great at capturing the inner lives of all these people, as they grow and change from 1974 to the present, from teenagers into their "thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention" -- and while only one of the initial group achieves greatness (as a Matt Groenig-esque animation mogul) this is enough to change all of their lives in strange, subtle and profound ways . . . imagine if your best buddy created The Simpsons . . . or better yet, read the book and see how Meg Wolitzer imagines it, as she is a professional imaginer.

Old and Proud

While the usual inclination in our youth-obsessed culture is to never admit how old you are -- or at least to massage the number a bit -- the opposite is true at my weekly men's soccer and basketball games: people loudly proclaim their age, the older the better . . . as a rolling stone gathers no moss (until it hits another boulder and cracks into tiny pieces . . . and that's how I felt yesterday, after playing basketball and soccer on consecutive days, I thought I had the flu or something, but it turns out i was just old and sore).

Folk Music is Boring (and so are Folk Movies)

The only thing more boring than listening to folk music is watching a movie about a folk musician -- and while I normally love the Coen brothers, their new movie Inside Llewyn Davis is so slow, melancholy, and plotless that I welcomed any time the movie circled back to the "missing cat" sub-plot; I must admit that I didn't finish watching, so something really cool might happen in the final third, but I doubt it.

You Can't Coach Height . . . or Warmth

God knows why, but everyone decided to have soccer practice on Thursday night, though it was below freezing and extremely windy, but I did a truncated session and ended after an hour, and went over to check on my other son -- who was supposed to continue practicing until 7:30, and when I saw him in a drill, shivering, I asked him if he was cold . . . and this was like asking a toddler if he got a boo-boo . . . just saying the word "cold" to my son opened the floodgates; he said "yes, I'm so cold!" and started crying hysterically, so I got him out of there and the lesson is this: it's much windier out on the turf than it is in the driveway.

As American as Basketball and Enchiladas?

A recent study found that negative social media posts can have a domino effect on the mood of readers, sending them into a moody spiral of downbeat posting and grouchiness . . . but the opposite is true as well, and so I'm going to focus on something positive today to brighten the collective soul of the internet . . . while I know the expression is "as American as baseball and apple pie," I think I experienced something equally or even more wonderfully American on Wednesday night: I played basketball for an hour and a half-- a sport that is arguably now more American than baseball-- and then I came home and ate a late dinner of some insanely spicy and delicious home-made enchiladas (made by my Irish wife) while watching "Shameless" on Blu-ray on my giant HDTV . . . sports, deserved gluttony, Mexican food, and a big TV . . . you can't get much better (or more American) than that.

Life Changing Error

Wednesday morning, I reached into my pocket for my cell phone, and mistakenly pulled out my wallet -- so I reached into the same pocket again . . . and pulled out another wallet; I had inadvertently taken my "going out" wallet to school instead of my cell phone, and so now I was walking around with two wallets in my pocket, instead of my wallet and my cell phone, which was silly, but also a great visual gag, so I made sure to tell everyone the story, while enacting it, and the producing of the second wallet generally got a laugh, so I'm quitting my job and going on tour as a prop comedian, like my hero, Carrot Top.

Not Including Sex, Dancing or Defecation

Two things that people make funny faces while doing:

1) shooting darts;

2) opening a jar with a very tight lid.

My Wife and I Take a (Small) Step Upward Towards Adulthood

For the past six months, my wife and I have been contemplating the purchase of a bed (and maybe even a bedroom set) because our old bed, which we brought back from Syria, fell apart -- and we got the rest of our ancient bedroom furniture twenty years ago when my Aunt Theresa died (and that furniture was ancient back in 1993) but we lucked out, and staved off the spending of any money on furniture (why start now?) because at the pub on Thursday night my friend Alec was describing his new bed, which has a padded headboard (actually he was describing how he got heartburn when he drank beer in his new bed while leaning against the padded headboard, but that's another sentence) and I mentioned that Cat and I had been sleeping on the floor for many months, and he said that he still had his old bed -- which happened to be queen-sized-- and he was willing got give it to us for free . . . which is a hell of  a lot cheaper than buying a new bed, so we went out and bought a box spring, tied it to the roof of the car, managed to get it down Route 18 without a mishap, and now we're sleeping up in the air again, like civilized adults, and hopefully this whole spending-money-on-a-bedroom-set idea will fade away like a kid's drawing on a foggy car window.

I May Have Finally Defeated Daylight Savings Time

The only way to short-circuit the absolute absurdity of "springing ahead" is to stay up really late the night before the clocks change, destroying your circadian rhythm, so that you can go to bed at 7:30 PM on Sunday to prepare for the ugly Monday morning wake-up (but even though I did this, I still felt like shit all day Monday . . . which isn't that unusual for a Monday, so I don't know what to think).

The Holy Mother of All Miracles (involving Balls)

Zealous readers of this blog might recall that I am often at the heart of miraculous occurrences -- especially miracles involving balls -- and last Thursday, the gods were at it again, placing me in what may be the most miraculous expression of simultaneity in the history of human consciousness; this all happened in the span of one shortened half day period, the last period the day . . . my friend Stacey was once again searching for a red milk crate full of various balls, and this milk crate of various balls -- which had been missing for seven months -- was usually located under the table in the English office, but it had gone missing way back in September and now Stacy needed the balls for a fun class activity, but after much searching she finally determined that they were long gone, and needed replacing, and so she went down to the gym to beg some balls from the PE department, and while she was down there, on a lark, she inquired about her red milk crate of balls and the PE teachers said that they had "definitely not" seen a red crate of balls, but they did have some random balls that they found -- but they were "definitely not" in a red milk crate, but Stacy looked in the cabinet anyway, just in case, and there it was -- the red milk crate full of balls that was "definitely not" in the cabinet . . . some overly zealous janitor must have taken the ball crate from the English office and put it where it "belonged" down in the gym . . . and while the finding of this crate might be deemed a minor miracle in some circles, I would not pronounce it so, BUT, if you juxtapose this event with what was going on simultaneously in my classroom -- and I mean to the minute -- then this event becomes an integral in a yin-yang shaped whirling vortex of serendipitous beauty . . . and so, while Stacy was seeking the balls in the gym, my friend Laura was searching for copies of Outliers, and so she came down to my classroom because she knew that I taught the book the year before, and I was able to locate a few copies in my cabinet, but I told her that there was definitely a box of them somewhere -- as I had lay witness to the box in the English office with my own eyes-- but I "definitely didn't have it" and Laura said she had asked around upstairs but no one knew where the box was, and so I cursed the name of the amnesiac hoarder who had taken this box of books, and refused to give them to her,  and I promised Laura I would keep my eye out for them (as I wanted them for later in the semester) and that I would smote the person who had them and then she went back upstairs with the copies we found, and then . . . moments after she left, Stacey walked into my room, jubilant and triumphant and told me the news -- she found the red milk crate full of various balls!-- and there was much rejoicing, and then she took a quick look around the mess that is my room, noting that there was a box of dusty soccer uniforms on one cabinet, and she wondered what was in the other box on top of the other cabinet and I said "softballs," and she said, "awesome, can I have a few for the milk crate?" and I said, "sure, they're not even mine, they're Kevin's" and so she got on a chair and took a look inside this cardboard box perched high atop my filing cabinet (Stacey is tall) and then she said, "you idiot, this is the box of Outliers," and she was correct, it was the box of Outliers that Laura had been looking for, the box of books I denied was in my room, and while I was denying that the books were in my room, at the exact same time, a PE teacher was denying that the red milk crate of balls was in the cabinet-- and we were both miraculously wrong in our certainty, and so Stacey and I rejoiced even more over this nested sequence of ball-related miracles, a sequence abetted by the limits of human perception and memory, and by my utter stupidity (and not only that, but my good metal water bottle was inside the box of Outliers as well, so now the universe is resolved and at complete stasis and rest . . . aside from what's happening in the Ukraine).

You Can't Fool the Tooth Fairy (Especially When the Tooth Fairy is My Wife)

The shiftier of my two children, Ian, recently lost a tooth, and he claimed that the tooth came out while he was brushing his teeth and fell down the drain in the bathroom sink . . . but this sounded fishy, and upon further inspection, my wife discovered that he was in possession of the tooth and -- God knows why -- he didn't want to give it up to the tooth fairy . . . but he obviously still wanted the night deposit that the fairy provides so he tried to pull one over on her (he has known for a long time that the tooth-fairy is mom) and after he got caught he cried and cried because "the tooth fairy doesn't give money to liars."

Meaner Girls? The Meanest Girls . . .

Megan Abbott's high school cheerleading novel Dare Me is tense, scary, and threatening; not only did I enjoy the thrilling noir plot, but I also gained valuable insight into stunting, teen anomie, and the art of betrayal (and though I know the cattiness of the rather despicable characters is ratcheted up to an unrealistic degree, it does make me happy that I have two boys and will probably never have to contend with a teenage daughter).

A Very Important Biological (and Moral) Dilemma

Should I feel sorry for my dog because he never gets to have sex-- though he frequently licks his genitals?

Awkward Dave Returns With a Vengeance and Suffers an Awkward Coincidence

Nothing upsets me more at school then when a student disrespects one of the hall aides, especially if the victim of the disrespect is an elderly lady, and so when I saw a student refuse to show the aide at the front door an ID (IDs are required to enter the building) and then walked away from her, I told her I would take care of it and I turned to follow the kid -- and as I turned, I caught him giving the aide the classic two-handed-double f-- you bird, and so I confronted the kid -- and he refused to show me his ID, and attempted to walk away -- and so I blocked his path and things got into that weird gray area where you've lost your temper with a student but you know you're probably not legally allowed to tackle him (but maybe you are?) and so you wonder how you're going to detain him (or you can simply just follow him, I once followed a kid who refused to show me his ID from the cafeteria into the gym locker room, where he attempted to hide in the corner) but luckily, before I completely blew my stack, another teacher showed up and she knew the kid's name -- and so instead of following him, I simply went to the office and wrote him up-- and all this happened before first period, I hadn't even taken my jacket off, so then I had some time to cool-off before my first class -- which is second period, as I have hall duty first period, but I still had to tell this wild tale to my Creative Writing class, but when I was halfway through, one girl said, "You better stop this story now" and I said, "Why?" and she said, "because that's her boyfriend" and pointed to a very sweet girl, who I turned to and said, "You're going out with a guy who gives the middle finger to old ladies?' and she smiled sheepishly and said, "Yeah, but I already talked to him about it, and told him he shouldn't do that."

Birthday Weekend Takes the Cake . . . A Rambling Summary of the Busiest Weekend of My Youngish Life

My wonderful wife arranged a surprise one-night getaway for my birthday last weekend (though I discovered the surprise a bit early, because we share an e-mail) and we met some old friends Friday in Greenwich Village, and my friends were nice enough to meet me in a "Dave friendly bar" -- and so Catherine and I made our way from the Hilton near Penn Station to the High Line, and then walked a bit up there . . . which is phenomenal and highly recommended, and then we hit the Chelsea Galleries-- which are directly below the High Line and which are also patently absurd -- and we saw some really bad modern art and some really scary modern art by David Altmejd, who essentially builds sculptures of horror movies, which is cool, but also begets many questions, such as: who buys this stuff? where do they put it?-- and though we found no answers, we did find some delicious pork and pineapple tacos in the Chelsea Market, and then we found Kettle of Fish, the "Dave friendly bar," which means: cheap, wood panelling, dart boards, pinball, dive-like and similar to the Park Pub . . . except this place was also full of beautiful young people, including some super-models hogging one of the dart boards, which was fun to be near at first but then got more and more annoying, but once Whitney and I got on the other board, no one was able to knock us off, a great birthday present, we won in ridiculous and dramatic fashion over opponents that were probably more skilled than us and did this for a good four hours straight, from 8 -12, until things dissolved . . .  and then after more drinking and pizza, we made it back to the hotel at 2 AM, got up the next morning and took the train home for soccer practice, then got ready for my oldest son's birthday -- he was born a day before me -- and went to Medieval Times, and though I could barely keep my eyes open, it was quite fun, sort of like professional wrestling (and our knight won!) combined with bizarre dinner theater (and Whitney reminded me of the best line from The Cable Guy, which is spot on: "there were no utensils IN medieval times, hence there are no utensils AT Medieval Times") and then we hosted a sleepover for a bunch of ten year olds and then on Sunday morning, I had to wake-up my younger son and his buddy from the sleepover at 6 AM so we could get dressed to play three indoor 8 v 8 soccer games, and then after coaching that insanity, we rushed to the basketball play-off game, as I am the assistant coach on that team, and we won and advanced in the play-offs, and then I finally got to take a birthday nap.

Brilliant Tactics in 4th/5th Grade Recreational Basketball

Things got slightly heated at the recreational basketball semi-finals Monday night -- the league rule is that every player must play two quarters, and most teams have ten players, which makes things easy to keep track of, but the particular team we were playing had been shorting their weaker players minutes all season and our head coach brought this up during the game and so the opposing coach had to play everyone equally, and though this team beat us earlier in the season, we beat them handily this time -- and I was impressed with my coaching partner's strategic use of the rules to make the game fair, but the opposing coach countered with a brilliant counter-strategy: he attempted to have his worst player foul the point guard on our team constantly in the final stretch, so that this weak player would foul out, and he could replace him with a stronger player . . . which, I must admit, is a brilliant plan-- something I would never have dreamed up (I can barely remember to call time-outs).

Two Comedians Walk into a Bar

Dinner table dialogue . . .

Ian: Who had the most children?--

Alex: I don't know;

Ian: George Washington because he's the father of our country;

Mom: that's not funny;

Alex: it's political humor;

Mom: now that's funny.