Like a Splinter in Your Eye

Yesterday, Ian redeemed himself for last week's malicious plumbing mishap . . . it was one of those days you can't even imagine until you have kids, and then when you're in the thick of it, you stay surprisingly calm --unlike when your child purposefully floods your ceiling-- so here is the briefest summary I can muster: I took Ian to the doctor in town yesterday because we noticed a black spot on his eye and though he wasn't complaining or rubbing it, we thought we should get it checked out, and I knew it was trouble when the pediatrician flooded it with a chemical, looked at it under black light, and then instructed us to immediately head to the opthamologist, but, unfortunately, all the doctors were gone from the nearby East Brunswick office, so we had to head to Bridgewater through the snarl of rush hour traffic, and once we got there, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and I don't even know where my insurance card is or what my wife's social security number is or whether we have a PPO or a POS or the name of Ian's primary doctor or what Ian's birth weight was or what my cell phone number is or when I was born or my address, so that didn't go so well, and then Ian stoically withstood a battery of eye tests and eye drops and anesthetic rubbed into his eye, and the kind and wonderful doctor was able to swab the chunk of stuff out of his eye with a q-tip because Ian was able to hold very still-- which I'm not sure I would have been able to do-- and she said he must have had a very high tolerance for pain, because most people are extremely agitated if they have anything in their eye, but he had a hunk of wood in it and never complained and if it would have been my older and more dramatic son Alex in the same situation I'm not so sure it would have went so smoothly.

6/9/10

In Creative Writing class we have Show and Tell, usually students read something or tell a story, but occasionally someone will sing or play the guitar, and last week a girl hula hooped in sync to a Lady Gaga song while she transliterated the lyrics into sign language: she is definitely a member of the multi-tasking generation.

Ouch

Right now I'm suffering from a case of plantar fasciitis, and (based on some half-assed Googling) this might be caused by bare-foot running (which I've been doing for a while now) or it might be cured by barefoot running-- this reminds me of Homer Simpson's maxim about alcohol: "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

European Crime

I'm still on a foreign crime kick: if you want a Scottish crime novel that's reminiscent of Fargo, try Denise Mina's Still Midnight; and we just watched the Kenneth Branagh version of Henning Mankell's novel Sidetracked-- Branagh plays tortured Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and the start of the show is stunning-- you'd never believe something called "rapeseed" could be so beautiful.

6/6/10

There are always three ants in our upstairs bathroom sink, but they aren't the same ants because I kill them every time I use the bathroom, so either they regenerate or else there are an infinite supply of ants somewhere in that bathroom.

I Think Dane Cook Is Funny

The other day in the office, the very funny but slightly obsessive guy who always calls into radio stations and wins tickets every week and then sell them and uses the money to buy authentic Battlestar Galactica paraphernalia on eBay (you have a guy like this in your work place right?) said he had a pair of Dane Cook tickets to sell, and when I expressed interest because my wife and I both think he's funny, I took some flak for liking Dane Cook-- apparently people who think they are hip don't like Dane Cook, they think he is "obvious" and "just in it for the attention" and "not very clever" and since I wasn't all that familiar with him, I had just heard some of his famous bits (car alarm, Kool-Aid guy, public restrooms, etc.) I did some research and listened to his new album (Isolated Incident) and his takes on race, suicide, masturbation, porn, and Obama all made me laugh, so maybe I am obvious, not very clever, and just in it for the attention as well.

A Case of Premeditated Plumbing

I'm not Mother Theresa, but I am proud to say that last night I did not beat, strangle, or kill my youngest child, and you might say, "That's nothing to be proud of!" but let me tell you the whole story: yesterday morning, our kitchen ceiling started dripping and I discovered that the "S" pipe in our upstairs bathroom was leaking, so we mopped up the water (and Ian helped!) and considered ourselves lucky that the leak was in plain view and then we instructed the kids not to use that sink-- and it's not even the main upstairs bathroom, it's the bedroom bathroom, so they don't use that sink anyway, and Catherine wisely put a towel over it to remind us not to use it-- now flash to yesterday evening, we're getting ready to go to the school carnival and Alex is drawing on the computer quietly and Ian is roaming around and suddenly the ceiling starts dripping lots of water, way more water than in the morning and I get very upset-- where could it be from?-- but I go upstairs and our bedroom door is open and the bathroom door is open-- and it is a difficult door to open-- and the towel is pulled aside and THE TAP IS RUNNING! . . . because Ian, bored and annoyed because Alex was playing quietly on his own, went upstairs, went into our room, removed the towel, and turned the water on and then came downstairs, didn't say a thing, and just waited to see what would happen . . . and by this time Catherine had left for the carnival (she was a volunteer) and so I had to deal with this alone and I was having serious rage issues and Ian admitted that it was premeditated, that he knew what the result would be and that he was in serious trouble, and-- after I told him that he had "betrayed the family," he was sent to his room and missed the carnival and lost all of his reward marbles and got a stern talking to and I may have kicked a chair, but like I said, there was no beating or strangling of the child, and I'm pretty proud of that, considering he nearly ruined our kitchen ceiling ON PURPOSE . . . just to see what would happen, and I'm getting angry all over again as I write this sentence . . . deep breaths, deep breaths.

6/3/10 (That's Right, Dave Has Been Married for TEN Years!)

Secret Lives of Your Children, Part II: I ran into Ian's pre-K teacher, Mrs. Z, at the grocery store-- she is the sweetest, greatest teacher, and so patient with my stubborn grouch of a son, and she has the kids doing all kinds of hands on projects having to do with science and gardening and cooking, and this is what she said to me about Ian, you can insert the subtext: "You know, Ian is so smart . . . not book smart, and he's compassionate too."

6/2/10

The Secret Life of Your Children, Part I: Alex received a multiple paragraph note from his teacher last week, not only was he fooling around with glue sticks during work time, but he also has a tendency to "forget" his lunchbox in the cafeteria, so then he has to go retrieve it, and Mrs. Y. told us to remind him that he's supposed to use the bathroom in the classroom after lunch, and that he shouldn't be in the hall bathrooms or playing in the hallway . . . essentially what I got from the note is that Alex is driving her crazy, that she's often searching for him, and that he's having his own adventures around the building . . . and so I told him to stop driving his teacher crazy, but it's weird-- I can barely control my kids when they are within ten feet of me, so how am I supposed to get them to behave remotely?

The Form of This Sentence Reflects Its Function

A Wired article called "Chaos Theory" summarizes Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, which argues that the riot of hyper-linked information on the Internet actually rewires our brain so that we comprehend less, and read in a cursory manner.

My Kids Refuse To Be Cute On Demand

In order to generate some material for the blog, I decided to ask my children difficult questions and jot down the results, which I figured would be cute and incoherent . . . so I asked my six year old how a car engine works and he said, "I think it burns up the gas and that makes things go around," which is actually pretty close and neither cute nor funny, and then I asked my four year old where animal babies come from and he said, "I don't know," so obviously this feature is not going to work out as a regular offering.

Two Completely Impossible Trivia Questions

Two trivia questions that have entertained people recently: 1) name the top three international best selling music albums of all time (according to Wikipedia)  2) what is the primary ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce?

Copulation > Assassination

A great moment on Madmen: ad-man Duck Phillips is meeting an ad-woman Peggy Olsen in a hotel for a "nooner," and Duck is watching TV while he waits for Peggy at their trysting place and he sees a news flash that President Kennedy has been shot and injured, but he knows his Peggy is just about to show up, and there's no way he's going to let a little thing like this ruin the romantic moment, and so he unplugs the television, and when she walks in moments later she is none the wiser, and then once they are post-coital, smoking cigarettes in bed, he says, "Do you mind if I turn on the TV . . . there's this news story that's bothering me," and then they learn that J.F.K has been killed . . . and I certainly can't blame Duck-- you can't let a national tragedy get in the way of copulation.

BONUS Post at Gheorghe:The Blog

Terry and I made a pilgrimage to the new Red Bulls Arena in Harrison . . . read all about it at Gheorghe: The Blog.

We Were at (the educational Trenton version of) Woodstock!

Last Saturday, Terry, Stacey, Mike and I attended the educational version of Woodstock-- the NJEA rally in Trenton-- and we are assuming that in the future, everyone and their brother will claim that they were there, but we were there and Stacey has the pictures to prove it; we took the train because we didn't want to be beholden to the NJEA bus schedule (and so we could drink-- we were hungry but elected to purchase beers instead of food for the train ride-- we assumed all the teachers on the train would be partying, but we were wrong, in fact, to our knowledge, we were the only teachers at the event to smuggle in alcohol-- beer for the train, and wine and Sprite in water bottles-- we were in Trenton, after all) and the event was packed with teachers, cops, and firemen . . . attendance estimates ranged from 30,000 to 35,000-- despite the crowds, the event was very well organized and there were plenty of Port-a-Johns and tons of great food . . . gyros and sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and crab cakes and grilled burgers and dogs, which made my rash culinary decision even more ridiculous, I was waiting in line to get a chicken gyro, which looked delicious, and I saw a lonely stand that was advertising "Pork Roll Sandwiches" and-- after feeling a sudden burst of Jersey pride-- I said, "This is New Jersey-- I'm getting pork roll" and then I regretted my choice for the rest of the day, but maybe not as much as Terry regretted his conversation with some cab drivers: "Hey, are you guys African? No? Oh, Haitian . . . well you're better off here than there," and when he was asked to explain that comment,  he claimed he just wanted to "talk some World Cup" with them, but then he got thrown off when they said they were from Haiti . . . and Terry wondered: what do you say to someone when they say thay are from Haiti?

Young at Heart/ Old at Heart

Once again I got mixed up in assessing people's mental age (a concept my friend Whitney invented, where you assign someone an abstract age, which they usually remain for the bulk of their life . . . he says he will always be 19, partying and trying to drink under-age, like it's getting away with something, and I will always be 90, seen it all, crotchety, going to bed early, don't really care how I dress or what people think of me) and first I was doing it in class, because it is great to do for characters in fiction, but of course the students wanted me to assess them, so I would assign them arbitrary ages (two silly girls: I say: "You're three," and "You're four," one asks, "Can I be five?" and I say "Sure," and the other says, "Then I want to be five too, if she gets to be five!" and I say, "No, you really are three") and some of them get upset ("Do I have to be twelve?" "Yes you do," "I want to be twenty one!" "That's just what a twelve year old would say") and I got borderline insulting, calling Liz a bit "snotty" and Laura "passive aggressive" and then assigning them random ages, such as 24, 114, 55, 62, 13, but the funny thing is, everyone listens to you very intently when you do this, because you are talking exclusively about them, and we love it when someone talks about us exclusively, even if the opinions are unfounded and stupid.

5/26/10

You may have tried some of the awareness tests that are available on-line, and hopefully, like me, you failed them miserably-- that's what FUN about them-- but I had my wife do a few of them (and I have read more books than my wife, so you'd think I would be smarter than her) but she kept passing the tests, which is no fun at all . . . she'd start watching and then she'd yell out the fun thing they reveal at the end of the test that normal people have to replay the video to see . . . and she guesses the end of movies too.

5/25/10

I'm working my way through Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by conservative British historian Paul Johnson (who lost his footing on the moral high ground when Gloria Stewart, the writer with whom he had an eleven year affair, revealed that he enjoyed erotic spankings) and despite the fact that I don't agree with some of his political stances, he is a vivid and entertaining writer . . . if only my history textbooks from high school had prose like this: "The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary phase in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic; the German state was huge creature with a small and limited brain."

5/24/10

So my boss asked me if I knew what "febrile" meant and I said, "feverish" and he said,"no, it means weak" and then a colleague agreed-- she said, "yeah, like feeble" and I took their word for it, although my one skill in life is that I can define nearly any word-- if I say a definition it's usually correct, and if I don't know the word then I know I don't know the word, but this was a clear example of Solomon Asch's experiments in social pressure-- all it took was two people agreeing to make me question my brain, but luckily, I had to look up the word "exiguous"-- which means diminutive-- and I remembered about "febrile" and so I looked it up and then I got to say the best three words in the English language: I WAS RIGHT!

5/23/10

Alex lost his sticker again at school, and he said it was "just for giving Leukey a high-five," and I said, "Just for that?" and he said, "Yeah, it was nonsense."