As I entered the gym, a woman who I know only slightly approached to say hello. After a moment of small talk, she said, “I just love how you don’t care what you look like when you come to the gym.”
I think she was trying to be complimentary, but I’m not so sure.
My wife made this for our daughter today.
I thought it was creepy as hell. Our babysitter agreed.
Thankfully, my daughter didn’t even recognize it as a face. She just started eating.
Yesterday afternoon, I participated in a panel discussion on the Huffington Post’s online television network, HuffPost Live, about the appropriateness of teaching young children to refer to parts of the body like the penis and the vagina with anatomically correct terminology.
The conversation was initiated as a result of a blogger who wrote about her avoidance of the word “penis” with her three year old son.
Here is the video of our discussion:
My wife is a tolerant, fair minded person who rarely finds a reason to become angry or displeased. She has no hate in her heart, and few things cause her to become angry.
However, there are a few.
1. Aliens. In truth, she is frightened by aliens, but this fear leads to genuine anger when someone knowingly exposes her to the slightest hint of a alien life.
You cannot underestimate the level of his fear.
Early on in our relationship, I had her watch the movie Signs with me, thinking it would be the perfect alien movie for her. The alien only appears a couple times throughout the course of the film, and never in clear profile. How frightening could that be?
Apparently frighten enough to continue to haunt her almost ten years later.
She acknowledges that ET was an acceptable alien film, but barely. I still cannot get her to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no matter how much I assure her that the aliens are friendly.
She is so frightened of aliens that the recent news that life on Earth may have come from another planet scared her.
The fact that I shared this news with her was not well received.
2. Tickling. There is no better way to enrage my wife than to tickle her. Even though she is ticklish, tickling her doesn’t cause her to laugh. She somehow replaces the laugh with shouts, threats and punches.
3. Bumper stickers. Actually, all forms of stickers on cars, including the stickers that pictorially represent the members of a person’s family, annoy her, but bumper stickers are the worst.
4. People who cut lines. I have watched my mild manned, even keeled, supremely polite wife fire off on unwitting strangers who inadvertently cut the line at the pharmacy, the coffee shop or anywhere else. Motives and intentions be damned. If you cut the line, you will face my wife’s wrath.
5. Cilantro. There are many foods that my wife does not enjoy but only one that she truly despises. Cilantro is it.
Last week I posted a list of 30 Real Reasons To Be Grateful For Living in response to a similar list of vague, insubstantial, meaningless items.
It turns out I might be a bit of a Nostradamus. Three of my reasons to be grateful for living may have already come to pass.
Item # 5 on my list states: Alien life could be discovered at any moment (or alien life could discover us).
This week researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high probability that life came to Earth — or spread from Earth to other planets — during the solar system's infancy when Earth and its planetary neighbors orbiting other stars would have been close enough to each other to exchange solid material.
In other words, we might be the alien life that we have been hoping to discover.
Item # 11 states: JFK assassination documents are still waiting declassification
This week new top secret White House recordings of the former President were released. They presumably have nothing to do with his assassination, but still…
Item #21 reads: Jimmy Hoffa’s body (or Jimmy Hoffa) could be found
State investigators will remove soil samples today from outside a home in suburban Detroit as police continue looking into a man’s claim that a body he says he saw buried in a backyard 35 years ago might have been that of missing Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
This news can be looked upon two ways:
Mitt Romney: “When I was a boy, I used to think that becoming rich and becoming famous would make me happy. Boy was I right!”
I know this video was recorded in 2005, and I know that the former Governor was trying to be funny, but could someone please inform Mitt Romney that he was rich from the moment he entered this world.
His father, George Romney, was chairman and president of American Motors, Governor of Michigan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a Republican candidate for President of the United States.
There was no “becoming rich,” regardless of what Romney may want us to believe. There was just rich.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being born wealthy, as long as you don’t try to pretend otherwise.
My daughter’s baby dolls celebrated Baby Teddy’s birthday this evening.
In a disturbing turn of events, Baby Reindeer, a staple in my daughter’s menagerie of stuffed friends, was served as a reindeer-shaped birthday cake.
On the bright side, she may finally be ready for the apocalypse.
I have a friend for whom everything seems to work out fine regardless of the circumstances. No matter the trouble he may find himself in, the universe invariably intervenes and saves his skin.
The most frequent example of this takes place on the golf course. Whenever he hits a golf ball into the trees, the ball will almost always strike a branch and come bouncing back out on the fairway.
Nearly every time.
When it doesn’t come bouncing out, it’s only because it’s managed to find just the right spot between two trees where there is still a clear shot at the green. Quite often the ball will be sitting atop several blades of impossibly stiff grass, in perfect position for the next shot.
It’s no wonder I’ve only beaten him once in my life. I’m competing against him and the universe at the same time.
Years ago, he inadvertently set off the school’s fire alarm while melting recycled crayons in an oven as part of a classroom project. The entire student body emptied onto the playground and the fire department sent its engines to the school, thinking it was a real alarm. I watched the situation unfold with an inappropriate sense of joy, thinking that there was no way my friend was going to squirm his way out of this one.
But it turns out the fire department had most of its engines on the other side of town that day, testing fire hydrants, so their arrival time to our school had been delayed. As we stood outside with our students, waiting for the engines to arrive, I heard our boss say that this unscheduled fire alarm was actually a blessing in disguise. “Had this been a real fire,” he said, “the fire department’s response time would have been unacceptable. This gives me the chance to have a conversation with them about how to prevent this problem the future.”
See that? My friend sets off the fire alarm, bringing instruction to a halt throughout the school and sending everyone one the playground to stand in line for fifteen minutes, and yet the fire alarm turns out to be a “blessing in disguise.”
The guy can’t lose.
I thought about him while watching this unbelievable, incredible, inconceivable video.
You’ll see why:
Earlier this week, I joined a panel on the Huffington Post’s online television network to discuss the appropriateness of children attending funerals for deceased friends and relatives.
Here is the video of our discussion:
My three year old daughter had a fever last night. She refuses to take any medicine, and as a three year old, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to force her to drink it.
We try to slip it into other food and drink, but rarely are we successful.
Last night I brought a measuring cup of children’s Tylenol over to her, hoping to convince her to take a drink.
Her response:
“I’m going to drink plenty of liquid and get lots of rest and that will make me feel better.”
Then:
“I’m not drinking that. It tastes like chicken, and I don’t like chicken.”
Then:
“And don’t bring me any chicken, either.”
What is a father to do with that combination of wisdom, wit and hilarity?
Thankfully, Clara was right. She drank lots of water before bed, slept for almost eleven hours and woke up fever-free.
I enjoy the movies a lot, but I have begun to enter movie theaters with great trepidation, knowing that it takes just one moron to ruin the experience.
The idiots who text during the movie are bad enough, and the people who actually make and receive calls on their cell phones make the experience untenable.
Then there are the extreme, albeit seemingly common, cases:
On Valentines Day this year, I found myself sitting next to a couple and their infant. The baby was noisy, cried at least twice, and at one point the couple changed the baby’s diaper while still sitting in their seats.
I don’t care what anyone says. Infants do not belong in movie theaters.
Then there was the toddler sitting in the front row for Cloverfield until the parents finally decided to act responsibly and remove their terrified child from the theater.
All I ask is to watch a movie in peace and quiet, but people seem so willing and capable of screwing this up.
Unfortunately, movie theaters do little to prevent these distractions even as they watch their ticket sales decrease year after year. They have no policy against bringing a baby into a theater and they rarely monitor the behavior of their patrons as they are watching the film. And even if a person wants to complain, it means missing a significant portion of the movie to do so.
I’m happy to report that someone is finally doing something about this problem, and the solution is almost too good to be true:
Ninjas defending your right to a quiet, distraction-free theater.
The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square has joined forces with Morphsuits — a manufacturer of skin-tight zentai suits — to launch an army of volunteer "cinema ninjas" who get to watch the movie for free in exchange for donning a black body suit and pouncing on misbehaving moviegoers from behind the cinema's shadows.
The "ninja taskforce" stunt has been met with critical acclaim, and was recently picked up by two other British movie theaters.
While I would prefer that the ninjas be professionals, capable of actually removing unwanted patrons from the theater (and inflicting a modicum of pain in the process), this is at least a step in the right direction.
It’s also the only step I’ve ever seen any movie theater to ensure that their customers enjoy a disturbance-free experience.
I have a few suggestions as well:
I think these three suggestions are reasonable in scope and would be fairly simple to enact and would be greeted with near-universal appreciation.
Most important, these three steps (in addition to heavily armed ninjas) would go a long way in providing movie theater patrons the kind of experience that the high cost of a movie ticket should guarantee.
It turns out that my daughter’s transition from the crib to a bed was not only effortless but provided me with unforgettable images like these.
Though she’s only three years old and can only read about half a dozen words, she loves to sit on her bed and read.
What are the chances that she stays just like this through high school?
Smokers are not as smart as nonsmokers. Considering the addictive nature of nicotine and the deliberate manipulation of nicotine levels by tobacco companies. this was an assumption that never seemed fair to me. Though I never tried smoking, I know how easily a person can become addicted to smoking if they decide to experiment with it at a young age.
Nevertheless, I’ve always thought that smokers weren’t as smart as nonsmokers.
It turns out my assumption might not be so unfair after all.
Researchers have found that smokers have lower IQs than those who abstain, with intelligence decreasing the more one smokes.
A study of 18 to 21-year-old men revealed that the IQs of smokers averaged 94 – seven points lower than non-smokers on 101.
The study also measured effects in twin brothers – and in the case where one twin smoked, the non-smoking twin registered a higher IQ on average.
This study was first published in 2010, and it has been repeated multiple times since then with similar findings.
This does not mean, of course, that all smokers are less intelligent than nonsmokers. This is the part of my assumption that remains unfair. There are some highly intelligent people in the world who smoke.
But it’s apparently not as unfair as I once thought to assume that in general, smokers are a less intelligent group of people as a whole.
What I would like to see next is research on the intelligence of people who have quit smoking versus those who continue to smoke. I assume, perhaps unfairly, that the smokers who eventually quit are more intelligent than the smokers who do not, but I’m not sure if a person’s ability to overcome addiction is related to IQ.
But I think it might be.
The New York Times (and many other media outlets) have reported on two new randomized clinical trials published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that removing sugary drinks from children’s diets slows weight gain in teenagers and reduces the odds that normal-weight children will become obese.
Though sodas, sports drinks, blended coffees and other high-calorie beverages have long been assumed to play a leading role in the nation's obesity crisis, these studies are the first to show that consumption of sugary drinks is a direct cause of weight gain, experts said.
Perhaps these are the first studies to demonstrate these findings because up until now, researchers did not see the need to spend time and money studying something that everyone already knew.
Drinking calorie-laden sodas can make you fat? We needed a government-funded study to determine this?
I’m astounded that two separate teams of researchers found this topic compelling enough to invest time and money in order study, and I’m even more astounded that so many media outlets decided to report on this bit of obviousness.
Couldn’t the researchers simply looked at the nutrition label on a bottle of Coca-Cola and come to the same conclusion?
Wasn’t the mere existence of a product like Diet Coke proof enough that a product like Coke contributes to weight gain?
Isn’t an standard of obviousness applied before the government agrees to fund a study that answers a question that everyone already knows the answer to?
What’s next? A study to prove that eating cheeseburgers and French fries can contribute to weight gain?
My wife thinks our son’s tiny feet are cute as hell.
She is not alone. Most women, and especially mothers, are surprisingly obsessed with baby feet. Charlie’s feet are often the first things that women ask to see when they meet my son for the first time. Women, including some I did not know, have even professed a disturbing desire to devour my son’s feet on more than one occasion.
While I find Charlie’s feet perfectly acceptable, I do not find them uncommonly cute in any way.
They’re feet.
However, our cat seems to be siding with the ladies when it comes to Charlie’s feet.
The Hartford Courant ran a piece about me today. I have yet to purchase a newspaper, but my friend was kind enough to send me a photo of the story as it appears in the paper.
My favorite part of the piece is the photo of me writing at the table in all my unglamorous glory: sleeping baby at my feet, Big Gulp by my side, a table scattered with papers and toys and mail awaiting my attention.
The next time someone tells me that they can only write in a coffee shop with their beverage of choice on a MacBook Air between the hours of 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM, I’m going to suggest that they be a little less precious about the time and location and method of writing and a little more precious about getting actual words on the page.
In the United States, if your dog needs a kidney transplant, you can take one from a stray animal if you agree to adopt the stray.
I like this. It makes sense. I take great pleasure in logical solutions.
It also got me thinking that I might also be willing to donate a kidney if the right person would adopt me. I haven’t had the benefit of parental support for more than twenty years and am willing to take anything I can get.
In fact, it occurred to me while writing that last paragraph that I have been living without the support or safety net of parents for longer than I lived with it.
When I was twenty years old, my stepfather left my mother after failing to pay the mortgage for six months and only then informing her of their financial troubles. She found a note on the kitchen counter stating that he was leaving her and warning that the house would be foreclosed on within the month.
Having cashed in my mother’s monthly disability settlement for a back injury that occurred at work in order to fund my stepfather’s failed multi-level marketing business, my mother suddenly found herself penniless. She and my still teenage sister moved into an apartment in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and struggled to make ends meet until my mother’s muscular dystrophy made it impossible for her to work. At that point she went on Medicaid and moved into a housing complex for the elderly and disabled for the rest of her life.
Ten years later, she died while recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the age of 57.
Since the day that my mother found that note on the kitchen counter and lost our childhood home, I have lived without parental support of any kind. With a mother trapped in abject poverty, a father who I had not seen for more than a decade and a stepfather who had proven himself to be an evil and despicable man, there was no longer anyone to lean on or anywhere to go if I was in trouble. This helps to explain my brief period of homelessness, my time spent sharing a room with a goat, my difficulties with the law and my long and rocky and utterly exhausting path to college.
When it comes to parental support, I have been on my own in every sense of the word for the past 21 years.
For many people, this scenario is unfathomable. While most of us will at some point suffer the loss of our parents, rarely do people find themselves without any parental support at the age of eighteen. Most of my friends, some almost twenty years older than me, still have at least one, and in most cases both parents still alive and actively involved in their lives.
I have friends who see their parents almost every day, eat dinner with their parents almost every evening, speak to their parents every day on the phone and have difficulty imagining how they would have survived in the world had they found themselves on their own at the age of eighteen, with no money, no home and no safety net of any kind.
They would have survived, of course, and probably thrived as I have. This is what people do. But it is much harder and much more frightening and considerably less joyous when you are doing it alone. My friends are blessed with support system that I never knew and can scarcely imagine.
They were sent to college by their parents, bailed out of financial trouble, provided with a home when it was needed, supported as they started families of their own, and blessed with the wisdom and counsel of a parent with far more experience than themselves.
In fact, data shows that nearly 60 percent of 23- to 25-year-olds report receiving some kind of financial assistance from their parents.
For me, I cannot imagine how it must feel to have parental support as an adult. Until meeting my wife, I have spent most of my adult life believing that I am standing on the edge of a cliff, capable of falling over into ruin at any moment. There was no one holding me back, no one ready to catch me if I fell, and no one willing to pull me back up if I had survived the fall.
While the strength and independence that I have developed as a result of being on my own has been a blessing, I think I would trade it all in for a set of capable, supportive parents.
Even one would’ve been nice.
So while I am joking when I say I would donate a kidney in exchange for being adopted, I am only half-joking. I see the relationships that my friends have with their parents today and I ache for what I have never known. I often find myself consumed by longing, sadness and envy when I see and hear the myriad of ways that my friends’ lives are changed for the better thanks to the guiding and stabilizing hand of a parent.
Still, I know that I am lucky. Though I continue to feel like I am standing on the edge of a cliff, I have my wife, my friends and my family supporting me. While it is certainly not the same as having your parents involved and invested in your life, it is a blessing nonetheless.
But had someone offered the twenty or even thirty year old version of me the opportunity to be adopted in exchange for a kidney, I might have jumped at the chance.
I’m almost certain that I would have.
The boy has started to laugh. It’s the best thing.
Watching this video made me realize that human beings have been constantly and consistently killing each other in organized fashion for hundreds of years, and at an astonishing rate.
I can’t believe that I haven’t found myself in the midst of a battle yet.
