The traffic light changes to green. The car in front of me does not move. I’m not angry or even annoyed. This can happen to anybody. I just want him to move.
I want to give him a friendly beep.
I say that a quick double beep is in order.
Others (including my wife) say that a double beep sounds annoyed and a single beep is better.
Which is the friendliest of all the beeps?
I don’t watch the Oscars, and I very much wanted a Twitter application last night that would block any tweet containing the word Oscar, but it’s worth noting that although I did not watch, I was almost certain of who the winners would be before the show even started.
For the second year in a row (and perhaps longer), USA Today went ten for ten in predicting the Oscar results.
Considering that you can wager on the Oscars with several offshore gambling websites (and coming soon to Las Vegas), this would seem like a reasonable opportunity to make some bank next year.
In 1997 I took an English class that featured the writing of Anne Askew, a sixteenth century English poet who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London before being burnt at the stake. The class was quite difficult. The text was written in Old English, and it was not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination.
I often found myself wondering why the hell we were reading it at all.
Almost fifteen years later, I have now run into the first Anne Askew reference since my college days. My current book club novel, The Tower, The Zoo and the Tortoise, by Jane Stuart, references Askew’s torture at the Tower of London (the setting for the book).
A literary reference fifteen years in the making. Was it worth the effort of that class and the long wait?
Maybe.
There’s a definite joy that one derives in acknowledging a reference that few others might understand or even notice.
A thousand times more powerful than the satisfaction of an inside joke.
And it also gave me reason to research the details of Askew’s execution, which were horrific but interesting nonetheless:
Askew was burnt at Smithfield, London, at the age of 25, on July, 16 1546, with John Lascelles and two other Protestants. She was carried to the execution in a chair as she could not walk (having been tortured for information prior to the death sentence).
She was dragged from the chair to the stake which had a small seat attached to it, which she sat astride. The executioner hung a bag of gunpowder around her neck as a humane act in order to speed her death along, and it exploded nearly immediately. Those who saw her execution were impressed by her bravery, and reported that she did not scream until the flames reached her chest.
This execution took place 450 years ago, and I still felt a pit in my stomach when reading about the details of this young woman’s death.
Madeline Albright on being a female Secretary of State and a diplomat:
“There is a great advantage to being a woman. I think we are better at personal relationships and have the ability to tell it like it is when necessary.”
Sarah Palin on her possible Presidential run:
"Nobody is more qualified really to multitasking and doing all the things you need to do as a president than a woman and as a mom."
These statements are notable for two reasons:
1. Both are clearly sexist, and if made by a men, would immediately be attacked by feminists.
Am I wrong?
If Madeline Albright can claim female dominance in personal relationships and the ability to “tell it like it is when necessary,” would it also be acceptable for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to claim that men make better generals because they think more strategically than women? Or for Joe Biden to claim that men make better Presidents because they handle pressure more effectively?
And if Sarah Palin can claim that women are better qualified to handle the multitude of duties on the Presidential plate, would it also be acceptable for Mitt Romney to counter with the claim that men forge more effective partnerships because we are less catty and mean?
Of course not.
Yet both Albright and Palin get away with these statements unscathed (and almost unnoticed) because of a second, equally notable reason:
2. Most men don’t give a damn if Madeline Albright, Sarah Plain or anyone else wants to claim female superiority in any realm.
Talk is cheap.
I’m thinking of assembling the poems that I have written over the years into a collection that my agent can then sell for millions of dollars because poetry is super popular and exceptionally profitable and super sexy. Sounds good. Right?
As I begin the process, I thought I’d post a few of the poems here to see what my readers think.
Here’s the first. A short and silly one with a title that has changed about a dozen times since I first wrote it.
Thoughts?
______________________________
A little boy in brown corduroy
couldn’t read the sign.
He pushed the door, fainted to the floor,
startled by a lady’s behind.
My in-laws travel with a lot of technology.
My friend, Tom, watched this TED Talk and thought of me.
The talk centers on what the Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman call "the four taboos of parenting."
One deals with the propensity of women to avoid speaking about their miscarriages.
With no experience in this realm, I will refrain from commenting on this one.
The remaining three are:
You can’t say that you didn’t immediately love your baby.
As Tom said when he brought this to my attention:
“You’ve been saying that ever since Clara was born!”
It’s true. I loved Clara when she was born, but in comparison to how I feel about her today, I barely loved her.
I marginally loved her.
I probably loved her as much as I love ice cream cake and the New England Patriots.
I loved her because I was expected to love her.
I was also hungry when Clara was born, which isn’t an excuse for not loving your newborn daughter enough except it is.
I was really, really hungry.
I hadn’t eaten in almost eighteen hours, and I had barely slept the night before. Clara would not stop crying. After extracting her from my wife via cesarean section, a nurse placed her in my arms and abandoned me. While she counted sponges and sutures and instruments for the next hour, I was stuck holding this screaming newborn.
In all of the useless childbirth classes that I was forced to endure, this important fact was left out:
It only takes about ten minutes to extract a baby via c-section, but it takes more than an hour to put the woman back together again.
And I was hungry, damn it. So how could I have been expected to love Clara in the profound and moving way that most people claim?
I just wanted a burger.
Besides, men are different than women. We are less capable of unconditional love. It became much easier to love Clara once she started loving me.
It may be taboo to say that you didn’t love your child very much when he or she was born, but I have been saying it for two years, as Tom can readily attest.
The remaining two taboos are:
You can’t talk about how lonely having a baby can be.
You can’t say that your average level of happiness has declined since your baby was born.
According to Griscom and Volkman, as taboo as they might be, both of these statements are generally true, and they cite the following statistics in support of their assertions:
58% of new mothers express a feeling of loneliness following the birth of their baby.
The average degree of martial satisfaction declines precipitously following the birth of a child and only rises after the child has gone off to college, as shown in this chart:
These admittedly compelling statistics lead Griscom and Volkman to assert that candor and brutal honesty are critical to successful parenting. They believe that soon-to-be parents need to be made aware of these unfortunate facts of life so that they can be better prepared for what lies ahead and establish reasonable expectations prior to the birth of their child.
I agree, except for one important caveat:
Whenever I dispense advice or information based upon statistical evidence, I always take the bell curve into consideration.
For example, although 58% of women report increased loneliness following the birth of their first child, 42% do not.
42% is a big number.
So when I am speaking to a new mother, I attempt to fix her position on the bell curve before choosing what to say.
I ask myself:
Only then do I proceed.
If I am faced with a generally dissatisfied, unskilled basket case, then yes, I would probably let her know about the 58% of women who experience loneliness following childbirth, because she is more likely to fall into this category.
But if I am speaking to a smart, organized, emotionally stable problem solver with a strong support system, I would be much less likely to warn her about the possibility of postpartum loneliness.
It’s simply less likely that she will experience it.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with a woman who feels lonely after childbirth. I simply have no desire to pass on depressing news and would prefer to err on the side of optimism.
The same applies to the statistics regarding martial satisfaction. Though the chart above is compelling, there is an invisible chart lying just behind it that illustrates the minority of couples who did not fit the line graph (and those who exceed it).
Again, the bell curve is at work here.
So when my friend, Jeff, asked me about the trials and tribulations of becoming a parent, I told him to ignore the naysayers and their doomsday warnings because Jeff consistently operates on the far end of the bell curve in almost all regards (excluding height).
He’s a smart, capable, successful, well rounded guy in a great marriage. I told him that my happiness has only increased with the birth of my daughter and that parenting is not as difficult as so many claim.
I expected Jeff to handle parenting masterfully, and I told him as much.
And he has.
A good rule of thumb (and perhaps an entry into Bartlett's someday?):
Average is only applicable if you are average.
The photo is unfocused, grainy, poorly framed, and poorly lit, but I think that might make it better than if it had been done well.
I love this photograph of my daughter.
I see utter joy in its imperfection.
There is a lot of fascinating information in this ten-minute TED Talk related to speech development and the way in which babies acquire language, but the piece that I thought was most compelling (and glossed over to a certain extent) was the evidence supporting the importance of talking to your child. The research demonstrates that speech development and language acquisition does not happen when a baby watches a television or listens to a recording of speech. Language acquisition is a social skill learned only by listening to another person speak in real life.
Any kindergarten teacher can describe the extreme disparity between students entering school and how, regardless of the relentless efforts of teachers, that disparity can often persist throughout the student’s educational career.
Closing a gap that has had five years to grow is exceptionally difficult.
Some of these differences can be attributed to factors such as IQ, but many teachers (including me) will tell you that the predominant indicator of success in a child’s academic career is the child’s level of effort and the effort and participation of his or her parents.
That effort and participation begins as soon as the child is born.
Inherent intelligence is great, but effort crushes IQ every time.
So please, turn off the goddamn television and talk to your baby. Sesame Street is great, but save it for when your child is two years old, and then administer it in small doses and only after you’ve spent enormous amounts of time talking to your child.
Talk to your kid. Please.
Think of it was an investment. Spend the time now when your child is a language sponge, or spend the time and money later when your child is a young adult, living at home, unable to support him or herself.
I promise you that it’s a hell of a lot more rewarding to work with a two-year old than a thirty-two year old.
My apologies for the sermon. Every once in a while my dander gets up when it comes to issues such as these.
Especially when it comes to the goddamn television.
I am quite susceptible to hypnosis. This trait may run in the family. My mother, a smoker for more than twenty-five years, quit cold turkey after one hypnosis session. I discovered my susceptibility to hypnosis after attending hypnosis shows twice in my life. Both times I have been brought on stage, successfully placed under hypnosis and made to be a major part of the show.
The first time was in 1990. The late Frank Santos, well known comic and hypnosis expert, was performing in a nightclub in Attleboro, Massachusetts. I took my girlfriend, Kelly, to the show, unaware that I would soon become main attraction.
When Santos asked for volunteers, I approached the stage. I had no idea if I was capable of being hypnotized (and doubted it's legitimacy), but I wanted to give it a shot. Santos performed a series of quick tests on each prospective volunteer, including a trust-fall, and I passed. He asked me to assume a seat on the stage.
This is the last thing that I definitively remember. Everything from here on consists of memories that came back to me well after the show, in addition to what Santos, my girlfriend, and the audience members would later tell me.
I was hypnotized almost immediately. As volunteers failed to become hypnotized or quickly fell out of hypnosis, our ranks were thinned until four of us remained on the stage for the majority of the show.
In no specific order, I was told to do the following things onstage:
Santos told me that I was Mick Jagger and told me to perform Satisfaction for the audience. The DJ played a karaoke version of the song and I performed the entire song, singing and dancing and doing my best Jagger impression. This memory, and the absolute belief that I was Mick Jagger, returned months later when I was driving in my car and the song came on the radio. Like a ton of bricks, the entire recollection dumped into my head, forcing me to pull over.
In a way I cannot describe, I truly believed that I was Mick Jagger, and in my memory, the audience loved me.
I was told that the floor was quicksand and that I was sinking. I quickly grabbed the guy sitting next to me, forcing him to the ground and climbing atop him in order to save myself.
A peek at my true colors, perhaps. My unrelenting survival instinct. I don’t remember this at all.
With the permission of my girlfriend, I was told to make out with the hypnotized girl sitting next to me. Apparently this went on for some time, and other, more colorful action was added to the moment. A vague memory of this came back to me several nights later after kissing my girlfriend, and I remember my initial thought was that I had secretly cheated on her.
I recall panicking for a second before the reality of the situation reached me.
But the moment that was remembered most was when Santos handed me a one-piece, unitard-like Superman costume and asked me to put it on. He told me that I was Superman and that I needed to save the world.
Santos later told me, “In all my years of doing this, every volunteer has taken that costume and run to the men’s room.”
I did not. Santos turned his back, thinking I had left the stage, and began working with another volunteer. As he did, I removed all of my clothing and donned the costume. My girlfriend later told me that I was fully naked onstage for at least ten seconds before finally managing to pulling the costume up my legs and over my waist.
When Santos finally turned back and saw the pile of clothing and my half-naked body, he realized that he had made a mistake. But with no way to correct it, and unaware until after the show of how exposed I had really been, we went on with the show. In my red and blue unitard, I proceeded to save several women in the audience from imaginary disasters before he specifically told me to go to the men’s room to change back into my regular clothing.
I can recall saving a woman from an imaginary safe falling on her head (though in my memory the safe is real and incredibly heavy) and jumping over an electrified fence in order to rescue a woman from a pit of snakes (apparently I lifted her right out of her seat and carried her across the room, finally depositing her on a table).
Thankfully, I do not recall my moment of nakedness onstage.
There were many other things that I was asked to do that night, but these were the ones that I am unable to recall in any way. Needless to say I did not pay for a single drink for the rest of the night and was patted on the back and thanked effusively by the audience members who remained after the show to drink and dance.
Years later I would be hypnotized onstage again at the Eastern States Exposition, and this time the show was videotaped. Once again I became the featured attraction. Though I have little memory of that show, I purchased the videotape to see exactly what happened onstage.
It was uncomfortable to watch, like watching someone who had taken over my body. Though my friends have watched the tape and laughed at my antics, I can no longer be in the same room while it is playing, and I have tucked it safely away lest someone accidentally find it and slip it into one of a the few VCRs still functioning.
Perhaps I should just burn it.
I watch a lot of partial movies on AMC while I am working out. Depending on the elliptical machine, I often have closed captioning automatically turned on for the film. It turns out that the captioning can be quite amusing, particularly when it comes to captioning the sounds in a movie.
How a deaf person is supposed to interpret the description of a sound that he or she has never heard before is beyond my understanding, but the descriptions are still fun and often provide an additional level of entertainment to the film.
While watching a western this week, I saw the following captions:
Sonorous beer fizzing (used just prior to a gunfight)
Frisking about (used to describe the unseen activity taking place in the saloon below the protagonist’s bedroom)
How drinking, gambling, shouting and piano playing became frisking about is also beyond my comprehension.
Ominous hammer cock (used to describe the thumbing back of the hammer on a pistol prior to firing, though the description certainly allows for a variety of interpretations)
When I was in high school, I would take girls to the local Stop & Shop on a first date.
When I told this to my wife, she asked what I would do on these dates.
A reasonable question, but I didn’t have much of an answer.
It was never anything terribly special.
We would walk the aisles, fill a shopping cart with the most incongruous items, debate the best apple of the bushel, write on the fogged glass in the frozen foods aisle, hide eggs in random places around the store, reorganize the cereal aisle and buy a meal that could be eaten in the parking lot.
I know. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but on the half a dozen occasions that I employed this strategy, it worked well.
“I just took girls around the store and made them laugh,” I told Elysha.
“So you took your show on the road,” she said.
Exactly. I took my show on the road.
And surprisingly the dates were always a lot of fun.
Then my wife said one of the nicest things that she has ever said to me.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “You have a lot of play.”
I can die a happy man.
I don't plan on dying, but theoretically.
This was the magazine cover that I was staring at yesterday while waiting in line at the supermarket.
Here’s the good news:
I did not recognize the woman on the front cover who was “obsessed with being thin” (though I suspect that she might not actually be a celebrity).
I learned that someone named Kim is in love and wants “his baby,” but I do not know who Kim is and do not know whose baby she wants.
Ashley and Pete have apparently been torn apart, but I do not know who Ashley or Pete are (though both look happy about their recent breakup/divorce).
LC and Whitney are in a jealous feud, but I do not recognize either person.
Sisters, perhaps?
I assume that the lack of last names means that Kim, Ashley, Pete, LC and Whitney are considered household names.
But not for me.
Once again, I find myself a little nervous about my deteriorating level of pop culture capital.
But I also can’t help but think that the time that I could have spent getting to know about Kim’s love life or LC and Whitney’s feud was better spent on the writing and reading and playing with my daughter that undoubtedly filled my time.
In fact, I suspect that I was probably better off clipping my toenails, twiddling my thumbs and staring at the ceiling rather than learning about the intricacies of Pete and Ashley's relationship.
Honestly, am I missing anything at all?
Teaching isn’t the easiest or the best paying job, but I have always wanted to teach and am happy that I chose this profession. In addition to the daily joys that it brings, I have found some of my best friends through teaching. Colleagues, the parents of students and even former students, now all grown up, have become some of the most important people in my life. I had no idea that teaching would fill my life with so many extraordinary people.
And there’s the added bonus that if I were to ever die on the job, one of my two dozen students would undoubtedly notice my corpse before long.
They are observant that way.
Not so for Rebecca Wells, a 51-year-old Department of Internal Services worker who died in her cubicle on Friday, February 16 in Los Angeles County and went unnoticed until the following day.
There may be days when I wish the kids mistook me for dead and just left me alone for a few minutes, but this is taking that desire to an extreme.
With the sale of my new book to a British publisher, I felt it was time to finally understand one of the great mysteries of life: United Kingdom versus Great Britain versus England:
What’s the difference?
Where in hell does Canada and the Falkland Islands fit?
My two-year old daughter, who cannot pronounce the letter L in the word please and is not potty trained, picked up my wife’s iPhone and brought it over to the shower door. She held it up to my wife, who was taking a shower, and said, “Animals.” “Alright, my wife said. “If you can find your animals, you can play with it.”
Clara pressed the button at the bottom of the phone to turn it on, swiped the “slide to unlock” bar, exited the app that my wife was using, swiped two screens over, located her “Animal” app, pressed it, and began playing.
The girl still sleeps in a crib, sucks her thumb, and cannot negotiate stairs. And we don’t even allow her to use the iPhone very often. She usually plays with her apps while we clip her toenails, change her diaper, or when she loses her mind in a restaurant.
Much of what she has learned has simply been by watching us.
Which is why I was not surprised to learn that a survey of online mothers found that more small children can play a computer game than ride a bike. In addition, only 20 percent can "swim unaided," 11 percent can tie their shoelaces without help, and 20 percent know how to make an emergency phone call.
I know that I was not allowed to leave kindergarten without the shoe tying and emergency phone call skills mastered. Mrs. Carroll would take us out of Mrs. Dubois’s kindergarten classroom and test us until we passed.
I recall the process being quite stressful, at least for me.
So we’ll get around to the swimming and bike riding and shoe tying in all good time, but for now, I think her ability to navigate the iPhone is quite impressive.
And a little frightening.
When I was a kid, my local library did not look like this:
Since when did libraries become equipped with germ-laden toys for children to fight over while their parents nervously attempt to negotiate the delicate balance between encouraging sharing and allowing an ill-mannered ruffian to run roughshod over their kids’ rights to the plastic waffle maker?
I’m not complaining. As you can see, my daughter loves the place. I’m just wondering when and why this decision was made.
Did some big picture guy say, “Hey, let’s get kids thinking that this is a great place at an early age, so as they get older, the library will feel like home.”
I hope this is not the reason. This rationale never works. It’s a nice thought until the toddlers become surely, cynical, anti establishment, opinionated, highly discriminating teenagers.
Then all those times spent playing with the Little People castle and cooking in the Fisher Price microwave will mean nothing.
A good rule of thumb: If you cannot appeal to your customer’s actual age group and must instead rely upon nostalgia to keep them coming back, you’re in trouble.
But whatever the reason for the toys and games and puppet stage, Clara loves the place, and I’m glad. It’s much more attractive than the library of my youth, a dimly-lit, one room library in the basement of the Town Hall containing (if memory serves me) a total of six long library shelves of books.
Compared to that place, the West Hartford Public Library is Disney World on steroids.
And eventually my daughter will realize that the building is filled with books, too. My books, even.
Right?
I was complaining about my house yesterday. The first floor windows are dreadful and in serious need of replacement. It was so cold in my office that I can see my breath.
Then I was reminded that I grew up in a six-room, one-bathroom house with four brothers and sisters.
Until I moved into my unheated bedroom in the basement when I was twelve, I shared a room with my brother, Jeremy, and my step-brother, Ian. Ian slept on a mattress that we shoved under my bed every morning so it wouldn’t be in the way.
I only moved into the basement after my parents went away for the weekend, leaving us in the charge of my evil stepfather’s mother, who was less than observant on many matters. While she watched television in the living room, my brothers and I moved my bedroom furniture into the basement without her ever noticing.
In fact, it took my parents three days to even realize that I have moved into the basement, and only then after noticing me come through the basement door one morning to use the bathroom.
“If you’re willing to freeze, you can stay down there,” my mother said.
During the winter, I slept in long underwear and had to pile no less than six blankets on top of me just to stay warm.
Eventually I began leaving the house through the hatchway (called a bulkhead in Massachusetts), thus eliminating almost all contact with my family during my final two years at home.
This is what the house looks like today.
Almost nothing has changed since I moved out when I was eighteen years old.
It was small and rundown and full of wonderful and dreadful memories, but I loved it just the same and still do.
How dare I complain about those office windows in my nine room, three bathroom, walk-in-closet palace.
I will be extremely upset if incontrovertible evidence of the Loch Ness Monster is unearthed after I die. Every boy on the planet wants the Loch Ness Monster to be real.
The latest string of Nessie sightings, including this new photo, only serves to frustrate me more.
Is it never sunny at a loch?
This is why I have no intention of dying.
At least until all the Scottish lochs are drained or a plesiosaur-like creature is pulled from the water by a local fisherman.