Blah blah blah

I honestly can't tell if Brett's sporting a comb-over or if he's just going for that 1970s throwback look here. His third tooth has broken through, though!

It's been a half-eventful week. Brett's been feeling better and catching up on sleep. Unfortunately, it's Amanda who's been spiking the 102-degree fevers for the last few days. Daycare's been a bit of a blessing in disguise in this case. Not that I don't want to hang out with my buddy--we'll be doing that next week--but we figure that if he's out of the house, she can rest and heal and maybe not run the risk of passing whatever back to him.

I've been plowing through various forms of entertainment these past couple of weeks with way more speed than I thought. Though, when a lot of your reading during the school year has to do with work, it's not surprising that the "I mean to read these" pile of books shrinks during the first couple of weeks.

So let's see ... what have I been watching and reading? Well, Smallville season six is almost done and has been entertaining despite the fact that Lana being hit by a bus would make the show way more bearable. Juno was really good despite the fact that a lot of the dialogue was way too catch-phrasey. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was tough through the first 100 pages but really got going and was incredibly intriguing through its last 400 or so. Silent Bob Speaks was fun and took a day to read, and now I'm 50 pages into The Host. I'll save judgment on that for later.

But for the most part, I'm at the most wonderful time of the month--broke until Monday, when I get paid. I'm not going to get too much into how I wish I could get paid on the last Friday of each month instead of the last day of each month because waiting a weekend suuuuuuuuuuuucks. I'll probably spend most of today being some sort of hermit, but then again I've been meaning to get more writing done than I have.

And I just rambled about nothing because all I really wanted to do was post a picture of Brett. Heh.

Obligatory Birthday Post

My friend Cathy e-mailed me last week and amidst the reason why I hadn't heard from her since before Brett was born, she wrote this:

If u have time can u email some pictures of your son(still wierd to think that)

The first part of the sentence is not out of the ordinary--not everyone knows of the Cavalcade of Cute--but the parentheses made me do a double take (and not just because weird is misspelled) ... or at least, as I turned 31 today, made me think.

Does it really seem weird to me that I have a kid? It kinda did at first, in that "wow, I'm a parent" sort of way but after 11 months it's not weird. Especially since I had him at 30 and am now 31. Like, if we were 21, 22 still I'd be, "Yeah, isn't it weird?" But I've got several friends who are married and have children.

And I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here or anything. I'm also not trying to do some cliche birthday lament. I mean, yeah, I could stand to lose a couple dozen pounds, but the "I'm ooooooooooooold" thing gets tired, especially when I teach people half my age and usually am so glad I'm not a teenager anymore. I guess I'm a little surprised that my reaction to a thought like that is pretty much, "These things happen. Eight dollars."

That being said--really good day. Brett and Amanda were home (both called in sick to school/work). We went to lunch (and Brett spent his time eating bread and looking around) and then I made pasta sauce for dinner (from scratch) and had the best chocolate cake ever. Oh, and Brett was nothing but fussy from 3:00-6:30 or so. We figured that it was his teeth, which are about to break through, and a pacifier helped soothe him, but the gargantuan poop he had (and this one smelled like something otherworldly) was definitely a huge part of it. I guess that was his present to me?

Vomit, Relatives, and Rectal-Cranial Inversion

So we had our first public incident with Brett the other day. I'd picked him up at daycare and then brought him to the Downtown Mall to have lunch with Amanda (after which, we'd parade him around her office and then head for home. Earlier in the day, the daycare center told her that he was running a little bit of a fever and they'd given him Tylenol, so him coming home and hanging with me would be good for him anyway.

While at Eppie's (it was chicken w/dumplings Friday--holla!), we sat in the back room and fed Brett some baby food. A few minutes after he was done, he coughed a little, gagged on some loose phlegm and decided to reenact The Exorcist on my right shoe. The two of us sprang into action like the crew at the Magic Kingdom cleaning up horse shit. Amanda sprinted for the ladies' room to get paper towels while I wiped down what I could. When she got back, I took him to the men's room and changed him (on the Skip-Hop, on the floor, which was not comfortable and he let me know it) into a change of clothes that had been "permanently" in his diaper bag (read: a romper that was a wee bit small). I think cleanup took a few minutes and we were out the door soon after.

Now I don't mean to pump up my ego TOO much here, but I am pretty impressed at the efficiency with which we handled this. I've been in too many places where child of parent does something that (purposely or inadvertently) causes a scene and spends more time saying "Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!" instead of just fixing things. I'm sure that the other two people sitting in the room noticed he'd projectile vomited but nobody said a word or gave us a look (well, I'm not sure about that other thing ... I was too focused on cleaning up the puke). And I really don't want to be one of those "My child's mishap/temper tantrum/bodily function should be the center of YOUR attention as it is MINE" parents. My parents never were--in fact, they were the parents who talked ABOUT those parents while those parents were in earshot, thus risking a confrontation.

It turns out that Brett's fever was getting worse and it spiked to 103.6 on Friday night. We kept on with the various fever reducers plus plenty of fluids and saw the doctor Saturday morning. There's nothing he could do but say that a) he's probably picked up a bug from daycare and b) there's no secondary infection, so we just have to let things run their course. That was reassuring but it did result in him missing a morning nap so when we went downtown for lunch with my mom, Aunt Ingrid, and cousin Ingrid and her daughter Kristen, Brett was a bit tired. But still charmed with his Shermy face because there were so many people around. Other highlights included me placing my BBQ meat loaf sandwich within his reach and him lunging for the bun. We got him some bread to gum and he looked quite content.

Actually, he was pretty chill as we walked around the various stores and didn't seem to mind when we came across the second of two people who obviously spend 99% of their time with their heads shoved firmly up their own asses. While Amanda and I were waiting for my cousin outside Alakazaam, a toy store and showing Brett all the cool stuff in the window, some three-packs-a-day, rawhide-skinned woman and her brood comes screaming up to the window, practically knocks us over and starts loudly pointing something out. I can't remember what the hell she was pointing at or exactly what she was saying because we high-tailed it to Caspari (next to which there was a guy playing bagpipes of all instruments ... like, really. Do people throw cash in your case to keep you from playing or to stop you?) but I know she was saying the same phrase over and over. You know what I mean--something like, "Jazmyne would love that. Jasmine would love that. Jazzzmiyne would love that" with increasing volume each time. Oh, and there was a woman (her daughter?) with a teeny tiny baby on her shoulder that was loosely swaddled and screaming her head off, like, "Bitch, it's 90 degrees out! I'm hot! I need air conditioning and a nap! And why does Grandma always smell like Winstons and Beam?"

The first head-ass victim we encountered on the drive downtown. We were on Route 29 and I was driving in the right-hand lane when the woman in the minivan ahead of us stopped because a mail truck had pulled over to place letters in a mailbox. Now, on any residential street, this would be no problem but 29 isn't residential, save for the few dozen bumpkins whose houses were built around the same time as Monticello. Presently, Route 29 just north of Charlottesville is a four-lane divided highway (LIers, picture Sunrise Highway as you go out toward Shirley, NoVA people, picture 7 as you leave Tysons and head toward Sterling). The mail truck, which obviously is driven by someone who does this route every day, pulled OFF the road with enough room for this IDIOT to slow down and calmly pass. But no. She STOPPED. IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING HIGHWAY. I didn't have room to change lanes so I had to stop behind her and laid on my horn while both of us screamed for her to "GO! GO! GO!"

Her reaction? To throw her hazard lights on.

I know it was a move of sheer panic, but still ... WHO THE FUCK STOPS IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING HIGHWAY YOU FUCKING MOTARD?! Thankfully, we were not rear-ended and wound up the first in a line of five or six cars that were blaring their horns at this stupid, stupid, FUCKING STUPID woman. I'm sure ours were not the only fingers raised in salute when she was passed after finally finding the fucking gas pedal (surprisingly? No Jesus fish or Bush-Cheney sticker on the minivan).

Oh, and Amanda tells me that at Harris Teeter today, she found herself perpetually stuck behind some dude with two kids pushing one of those huge shopping carts that is meant to look like a fire truck or racecar or something. Is there a technical term for those people who you seem to always be stuck behind no matter what aisle you are in at the supermarket?

Friggin' people. But Brett's feeling better. And making serious inroads at standing on his own!

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

So it's Father's Day, and as usual I called my dad, talked with him for a little while, and then went online to check out things I usually read on a Sunday morning, like PostSecret, and various and assorted livejournals, blogs, and other writery types of places. Usually I don't react much to what's written on those sites but this morning I was a little peeved. Not at the content I was reading, but at my dad.

Because apparently, my dad fucked up royally as a father. I haven't spent my life feeling like a massive disappointment, and he wasn't a drunk, abusive, or missing. In fact, he changed his life for the better when my sister and I were kids and quit smoking 20 years ago. What the hell is up with that? I can't put that on a postcard over some vintage-looking photo, and I sure as hell can't write novels with father figures that are the personification of evil.

Where am I supposed to come up with material as a writer? The fact that my dad sent me a card of congratulations when I told him I scored the winning run in a college intramural softball championship game does not make for good literature. And nobody wants to read about all the Schwarzenegger/Van Damme/Seagal flicks we saw at UA Patchogue 13 when I was a kid.

Dads are supposed to be distant or tyrannical, the type of authority figure that doesn't command respect as much as demand it, and is called "the old man." They're not supposed to have an eye for interior decor and let you help hang wallpaper and crown moulding--although that was boring as shit to do ... standing in the driveway with one end of a piece of moulding while he cut the other end with a mitre box is not exactly a fun afternoon, but who gets even 250 words out of that?

Sigh ... Happy Father's Day, dad. Thanks for the lack of issues.

What's on another channel

So the reason I haven't posted too much around here is because I've been going heavy with my other blog, especially considering that tomorrow is my last day at this school (next year, new school). I wanted to cross post a little because I'm always trying to get people to read more ...

Somehow, I was able to navigate the teacher job market sea and come out intact and will teach at another high school in the same county where I'm living, cutting my daily commute from 1 hour, 15 minutes each way to 15 minutes each way. With an infant and high gas prices in my life, this was a necessity and I'm glad I did pull it off.

The always-treacherous new-school job search.

I don't feel bad about letting you go, I just feel sad about letting you know

To be honest with you, I am surprised I don’t have several ulcers because this paper is (to use a geeky reference) the Millennium Falcon of high school newspapers—half the time, things don’t work but we can still blow you away.

My end-of-year tribute to my high school newspaper staff.

We came, we saw, we conquered and crumbled in our own true way

Seriously, I thought it was the bomb, even if Lisa Simpson hit it on the head when she described it as, "what the people in 1964 thought the world would be like in 1987."

Okay, not so much about the end of the year but I needed to show you that I did a massive entry on EPCOT Center.

The Future is Then

1. Teaching students about national tragedies. I love how that sounds just really sick and twisted. But this year in journalism I turned my attention to how large-scale events are covered. One was the Virginia Tech massacre, which was a discussion not of the tragedy of the event but the media coverage. Much earlier in the year, I did a three-week mini-unit on September 11 that focused on not just the media coverage and bias/non-bias in the media but the cultural aspect of it. Over the summer I'll probably do an entire entry or two as a "stuff that works" thing because I was really proud of what I did with that unit.

Hitting the Highlights: Top 10 Things That Were Great About This Year

I made what is quite possibly the dumbest mistake of my career this year; I overestimated how smart my students were. No, seriously. In both Journalism I and inclusion English (I knew how smart my yearbook and newspaper staffs were because most of them were returning students), I assumed that most of the students in those classes had a certain amount of basic knowledge that would allow them to a) comprehend things at or near grade-level; b) comprehend a set of directions; and c) have basic control of their bowels.

Two out of three ain't bad.

And the lowlights

There's going to be an entry or two more and then I'll probably start writing in this journal and throwing the occasional movie review into the other one.

Five interesting things I've read lately ...

1. The Baltimore Sun's coverage of the death of Jim McKay. I'm definitely familiar with the Wide World of Sports and also familiar with McKay's lesser known works such as the Loyola College in Maryland recruiting/admissions movie that I actually have a copy of in my basement. He was one of my college's few pretty famous alumni, and a former sports editor of The Greyhound. Needless to say, though, the media has lost a titan.

2. "A Cavalier Attitude". Seriously, I got dumped for one of these cars once. I mean, I know it's no Hyundai Excel but come on ...

3. "Remembering Ten-Cent Beer Night". What's awesome about this piece is how insane it keeps getting as you keep reading. Man, I wish I was a baseball fan in the 1970s.

4. One Crazy Summer over at Tomato Nation. Dude, when I was 13 or 14 I thought this movie was THE SHIT. Now, I kinda realize it was just shit. I mean, any movie that has Demi Moore singing in it. But at least it's not Hot Pursuit.

5. "The Little Man: I Wanted a Girl but I Got a Boy". Eh, get over yourself. Boys are fun. I mean, Brett clocked me between the eyes with his sippy cup tonight, but I had it coming. Besides, I got a biiiiiiig daddy hug from him, so it's all good.

All right, me go sleep now.

The things that keep us sane during children's programming

Before he goes to bed every night, Brett watches "The Good Night Show" on Sprout with us. Well, not so much watches as crawls around when the cartoons are on and gets mesmerized by Thomas and Friends and the puppet, Star (he really likes the Muppets. And for some reason, that Red Stripe commercial about how it has been "helping our white friends dance for over 70 years" that airs during PTI). When the cartoons are on it's time for him to crawl, pull up on things, and try to climb daddy in hopes of sticking his fingers up my nose.

We get through most of the first hour of "The Good Night Show" each night, and the moment that one of us takes Brett to his room for storytime and bed, the other flips over to family fun programming like TMZ. It's not that we don't enjoy Nina and Star's company [aside: apparently, the actress who plays Nina got tattooed on Miami Ink. This brings the Nina and Star segments up to a whole new level], it's just that the cartoons that are played are so mind-numbing you need gossip or smut (or HGTV) in order to stay coherent.

Of course, since Brett can't fully comprehend what we're saying at this point, we can totally snark on the cartoons, which keeps us from going crazy. Some of the more colorful commentary for some of the cartoons has included ...

• Amanda calling the Berenstain Bears the "Family Circus of cartoons."
• comments on how the Berenstain Bears are actually named "papa," "mother," "sister," and "brother." Like, actually named those names on birth certificates and shit. You could have another character named "Logan" or "Parker" or "Mojave" that act as plot devices but they call the brother and sister "brother" and "sister."
• "Even West Virginia's family tree forks somewhere."
• My constant commentary that "sister" seems to be have the shoulders of a young Lawrence Taylor.
• Our agony at the endlessness of the theme song to "Dragon Tales," which is always stuck in our heads.
• A discussion the other night about the use of the word "but" in the theme song. "Around the room the dragons flew/but Emmy and Max knew what to do ..." Uh, okay, so if they didn't know what to do would they be chained to rocks while birds flew and ate their innards for all eternity or something? Oh, and why is one of the other dragons, "shy but very smart"? Since when is shyness an indication that you're a moron?
• The "well that totally makes sense" during the "Dragon Tales is funded by a NCLB grant" announcement.
• The fact that the main girl character, "Emmy" has a weirdly drawn head.
• How unrealistic it is that "Emmy" and "Max" ALWAYS get along. If I were perched on my windowsill reading a book and Nancy were making a ton of noise with whatever toys she was playing with, there would be a lot more yelling and screaming and maybe a few shoves. These two are fucking POLITE! WHO'S POLITE TO A SIBLING?!
• Speculation that Thomas & Friends will one day revolt and kill Mr. Toppemhat (sp?) and all of the other humans on the Island of Sodor (which, btw, sounds a LITTLE TOO MUCH like Mordor), like in Maximum Overdrive.
• Observations on the fact that Mr. Toppemhat never seems to do work. "Mr. Toppemhat was eating a steak when he got a phone call ..." "Mr. Toppemhat was at afternoon tea when he was interrupted ..." "Mr. Toppemhat was doing lines when his secretary burst in ..."
• Annoyance at the entire show, "Make Way for Noddy," which comes off as, "Hey, I have crappy computer animation software AND I saw Toy Story!"
• How the music for "Make Way for Noddy" sounds like one of the stages of Diddy Kong Racing.
• Wondering if the character "Dinah Doll" is a racial stereotype.
• Calling Caillou a bitch-ass.

And hey, I know they're kids shows and the shows we watched when we were kids weren't all that great--I re-watched old Super Friends episodes when I was in college and they're horrible--but I need something to get me through waking up in the middle of the night with the bridge to the "Dragon Tales" theme song stuck in my head.