Brushing off the cobwebs

Wow, 2010 was the last post.  It seems like yesterday, like so many other things involving kids.  The kid count’s still at two — and staying there — and they’re turning into quite the fun pair of oddballs. I’ll be getting back to posting here soon for the two of you that check every once and again.  I’d like to promise a regular schedule to such updates, but that might be a little ambitious at the moment. See you soon!

They won’t be able to lift the polearms until they’re older, so those are OK for now…

Unlike most mothers and fathers in America, the missus and I looked at our baby daughter and said, “She’ll be crawling soon. We’ll need to store the swords higher.”

Yes, swords.  My wife is quite the RenFest fan (although we haven’t been to one since the kids were born, but I can see us taking them out to one when they’re a little older). I spent a few years studying Iaido before the knees started screaming that they just wouldn’t accommodate certain wazas.

Our daughter might be the only one at the prom with one of those rings that doubles as a poison container, her own mead tankard, and a clear understanding (in case of, you know, a zombie apocalypse breaks out during the prom) of what constitutes an efficient cut.

The boy will probably be a “Hulk smash!” kind of guy.  But right now, he’s all grabby with everything he sees. So no swords within reach of him, either.

But as Penny Arcade often proves, we aren’t considering all of the possibilities…

Advice to My Replacements, Episode 1: Negativity

Kids,
From time to time I’m going to go into beard-scratching mode and try to lay some wisdom down on y’all. I don’t claim to be particularly wise. But I’ve been around for about forty years now, and you tend to pick things up, even if it’s just on the strength of some monumental mistakes.

Today, I want to talk to you about negativity. Now, when you guys hit your teenage years, you’ll hear me rant and rave a pretty good bit about how sullen the two of you are being, but that’s natural.  You’re going to think you know everything, that no one outside your circle of smug friends knows anything at all, and that the whole world — especially the pair of speed bumps known as your parents — exists for the sole purpose of keeping you down. But you won’t be the first, although there’ll be no telling you that, either.

But don’t let that turn into negativity or cynicism.  Your generation will have a lot to blame my generation for, but don’t let that get in the way of accomplishing something yourselves.  I used to consider myself a cynic, until two recent quotes set me straight.  One’s from Stephen Colbert’s 2006 Knox College commencement address:

Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

The other is from Conan O’Brien’s last episode of The Tonight Show.  O’Brien had many reasons to be bitter, and he took his frustration out on NBC in hilarious ways, but when it came time to say farewell, he showed class and wisdom:

All I ask of you, especially young people … is one thing. Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.

So maybe your dear old sarcastic dad might not be such a cynic after all.  I might be pessimistic about the effectiveness of certain people or institutions. I might even be angry about their ineffectiveness. But at the very least, that anger is at least rooted in a belief that things really can change.  So I don’t know how much that really qualifies as full-blown cynicism. Besides, as long as I listen to music the way I do, I don’t think I can ever truly be cynical.  The music geek’s eternal quest, after all, is to find something that lights a flame in his spirit just like that first flame got lit back when we were discovering our parents’ Beatles records.

But you’re going to run into something even worse than cynicism in your lives, and that’s out-and-out negativity.  I’ve catalogued what I think are a few major types of negativity you might encounter. At least, these are the kinds that I’ve met:

“Woe is me, the whole world’s against me”
You’re going to meet talented people, people who should be on top of the world doing what they love, except they’re not. For whatever reason, they’re working a job they don’t like, or not getting the chances to let their talent shine the way it should. In some cases, there might be legitimate reasons that this happens to people. The world’s not fair, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get to follow your bliss. But beware of the person who refuses to look at his current situation as the result of his own decisions.  These people are just draining.  Not only is it exhausting to listen to their constant litany of complaints, but the very second you make the mistake of thinking they want any honest input, you’ll find that negativity directed towards you.  It’s really not worth it, and I’d say that of all the negativity you might encounter, this one might be the worst.  Seriously take a step back and decide if the plusses outweight the minuses of having a person like this in your life, wasting time yoiu could be using to create or accomplish something with their nonsense about how nothing’s their fault.

“You freaking idiot”
You probably won’t meet this person until you’re older. Maybe you’ll be stuck in a study group with this person. Maybe you’ll be working with them every day at your job.  But you’ll meet someone who’s decided that everyone else is clueless and incompetent.  It’ll even filter into his ways of talking to people, to the point that you can append the phrase “you freaking idiot” onto the end of anything he says.  If you want to get fancy, you can even use it as an embedded clause, as in “Well, you freaking idiot, I think it should work this way.”  To a point, it’s funny to watch this person’s head explode every time he has to deal with the more rogue, loosey-goosey personalities in your group, but overall, his attitude just brings everyone down.

“But enough about you, let’s talk about me”
I ran into this type of negativity when I first went off to college. I’d call one of my friends and start telling him what I was up to, and he’d inevitably interrupt to crack a joke about it, or to change the subject to himself.  He wasn’t egotistical in this way. He’d just been unable to go to college like he wanted, and he felt a bit insecure about it when I brought the whole “college experience” up.  It took me a little while to figure this out, and to be fair, this friend isn’t a negative person. But that experience did clue me in to the fact that a lot of people later in life could make themselves feel good only by cutting my experiences or stories or thoughts off at the knees.  Granted, my thoughts aren’t always worthy of being aired — they usually aren’t, thus the quiet in-person persona you know so well — but it’s no fun at all to deal with someone who feels threatened by a conversation that’s actually a conversation.

“I don’t want to do it, even though I enjoy it”
I throw this one in because you’re going to see it in me. As I get older, I dread going into new situations — for no other reason other than they’re new.  Heck, I even dread things I’m familiar with that I know how to do. For example, if I get tickets for a show at a venue I’ve been to a dozen times, I start thinking, “Oh, the parking. Oh, the crowd. Oh, the hassle.”  But when I get there, I have the time of my life. It’s something I’m aware of, and I try to combat it, but I’m afraid it’s a symptom of age. You just get comfortable and kind of dread new things. To be fair, your mother does not suffer this affliction, and you can count on the both of us to constantly be pushing the two of you out into the world to experience new things.

That’s all I can think of for now. I’m sure there are more. Heck, there’s no telling what kinds of new negativity technology will bring about, so consider yourselves “blessed” to be part of that brave new world going forward.

The boy’s nine-month checkup

My son just had his nine-month check-up.

He’s been a hoss since the day he got here, sitting somewhere above the 99th percentile in height since he was born.  I admit to taking a perverse sort of pride in this. His sister’s going to be tall, and while we want her to top out at a reasonable height for social reasons, it’s pretty much the sky’s the limit with the boy. Especially if he can support us in our old age with a lucrative basketball contract or something!

But on his most recent checkup, he landed in the 96th percentile on height.  My wife told the pediatrician, “His dad will be disappointed.” The pediatrician replied, a little startled, “What? Does he want him to be 6′ 10″?” My wife responded, “Probably.”   Now in all seriousness, I don’t care how tall either of them are, and I know these percentiles are really only valuable for seeing if something lags or spikes when it shouldn’t. The genetics on both sides are that they’ll be tall, so they’re stuck with that, whether they like it or not. Still. The 96th percentile.  I’ll definitely have a talk with him about his lack of ambition at the yearly family review.

And he’s apparently only in the 67th percentile on weight. This figure makes me want to sneak in the pediatrician’s office at night and check their scales. The boy’s like a sack of greased bricks — a sack of greased, crying bricks — when you try to pick him up.  There’s NO WAY he weighs only 22 lbs.

But I guess he needed to take time off to grow a giant brain, since his head grew by leaps and bounds this time around.  In my more sarcastic moments, I tend to believe he grew his skull just so it would give him better timbre and projection in his crying fits.

The pediatrician asked about a couple of developmental milestones. They asked if he was waving bye yet.  This sounds kind of advanced for a 9-month-old, but apparently he should be doing it.  He’s not, but it’s not something we’ve really tried to get him to do.  Besides, why wave bye when my family’s traditional farewell, “Y’all come with us!” will do just fine?

Or maybe he’s a vengeful sort. Not waving bye implies, “I’ll be seeing you later. Oh yes I will. And I will bring the crying, and I will bring the volume.”

Actually, he says goodbye by crying. Even when you just walk behind him. So the developmental milestone known as separation anxiety?  Check.

They also asked if he was picking things up with his thumb and forefinger.  He does this when you give him something small enough, but he doesn’t seem to care for it.  After all, it’s not a very good grip for grabbing something fist-sized and slamming it into the TV screen a dozen times before you can get to him.

So all told, a pretty good checkup.  Still no answers for getting him to sleep through the night. I guess he’ll just have to grow out of that one, since nothing we’re doing seems to make a difference on that front.

Seems like a lot to go through to finally be called a “dangerous man”

When I told my general practitioner I wanted a vasectomy, he referred me to a urologist he knew. “A good man, a gentle man,” he said.  And he assured me that, if my insurance didn’t cover this particular urologist, he’d find another “gentle man” who could do the job.  I have to admit, I liked the sound of that, this emphasis on “gentle.”  Even if the whole “gentle man” angle might ultimately take me, if there were insurance problems, into an illicit but cuddly world of underground vasectomies.

So I set up the appointment and met the urologist, a very personable fellow full of jokes and practical advice like:

• “Go with frozen vegetables instead of a bag of ice while you’re healing. They’ll adhere to your contours better, and they won’t turn to water when they defrost.”
• “When you get ‘back in the saddle,’ do it from a male-dominant position at first. You don’t want some wild thing on top of you before you know what you can take.”

Apparently, at least based on what my friends have said, all urologists are like this when talking about vasectomies. Maybe it’s to keep us at ease.  Maybe it’s a sense of “welcome to the brotherhood” (as my urologist had undergone a vasectomy himself). For whatever reason, all of my friends’ vasectomy stories involve wisecracking urologists who joke about the whole thing right up until the last stitch is knotted.

I’m a fairly private person (despite the irony that I’m writing about this on a blog), but there were a few people I felt comfortable talking to about my decision.  It was interesting.  When I told some people that I was getting a vasectomy, there was this odd moment in their eyes, as if they were saying, “Why isn’t your wife getting fixed instead?”  This was mainly from older people, who came from a time when it was less common for a man to do such a thing. Where I work, though, it seems like every guy I know has one, which seemed to line up with my urologist’s statement that a man my age with a couple of kids is the poster boy for vasectomies.

In the leadup to the procedure, I admit I milked the whole situation.  Any time my wife made a comment where I could even remotely turn it into a lament about the huge sacrifice I was making, about how I was turning myself into half of a man, about how the pets would hiss at me because they knew something in my chemistry was off, I did so.  And I made sure to show her the illustrations from the pamphlets (which hadn’t been updated since the late ’70s, from the looks of the pornstaches on most of the men) that showed wives waiting hand-and-foot on their heroicly recovering, recliner-bound menfolk.  My wife knows to ignore this kind of thing.  Besides, she knows that I’m not dumb enough to make a real complaint when she’s sitting across the room, our giant two-month-old son draining her for sustenance every two hours.

But I have to admit that there is a strange sense of finality to it. Even though my wife I are sure — quite, quite sure — that we’re done having kids, there’s a sobering sense of “Well, that’s it, then. A good set of genes cut down in its prime.”  Once I got over that, though, I gave the boys a fond farewell. A cold snap was hitting our area of the country, so I had a good excuse to use the new car’s seat warming feature every morning, free of any guilt that I was cooking my genetic material to a wobbly-swimming crisp.

The procedure itself really wasn’t that bad.  Not something I’d rush to again, but really just more uncomfortable than painful. Definitely not something to let your imagination run wild with, though, trying to figure out what all those vaguly numb, odd sensations down there are all about.   When the doctor walked in, he asked me if I’d changed my mind. I told him no, that I was sure I wanted to go through with it.

“Has anyone ever backed out?” I asked him.
“No, they never have,” he replied.
“It’ll happen one day,” I said.
“Probably,” he agreed. “The closest I had was a couple of weeks ago. I walked in and the guy was crying — I mean heavy weeping and sobbing. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this, and he replied, ‘My wife told me not to come home if I didn’t!’”

Once we got started, it was a strangely casual scene. There I was, not only with my goods out for all to see, but also with a man pulling things out of those goods and snipping them.  Nurses would come in for this or that, the urologist and I had a good long conversation about how we found ourselves in our respective careers, he told me funny and sad stories about things he’d run into as a doctor. Really, it was about as much fun as you can have while you’re voluntarily cutting your bloodline off at the pass, so to speak.  I’m generally pretty curious about medical stuff, and I would have loved to have watched the procedure, but figured the doctor really didn’t need me sitting up watching him do his work. I did glance down once towards the end, though, when he was stitching me up. I swear he had both ends of the string pulled up above his head. He was either tying the tightest knot of his life, or he was pretending he was a puppetmaster.

The recovery was fine, too. We sent my toddler daughter off to spend the night and the next day at grandma’s, since my little one has an uncanny ability to accidentally knee, punch, or headbutt me between the legs about three times a day.  I spent the rest of the day on the couch with the aforementioned bag of veggies, asking my wife to do all kinds of little things for me, and then I coasted through the weekend, doing pretty much nothing at all. There really wasn’t any pain, but if you’ve ever been kicked in the groin on the playground or the like, you may recall a vague feeling of nausea that seems to travel up your abdominal muscles.  Just a weird queasy feeling that was never more than a mild annoyance.  About a week-and-a-half later, I was back to 100%.

So now, until all of the followup visits prove otherwise, I’m considered a “dangerous man.”  After seeing the illustrations of what’s done, it’s absolutely amazing to think that you could ever have a vasectomy and still get someone pregnant. But I do know at least one person who had one, and then had twins.  And someone else I know had to have their procedure redone because the first one wasn’t good enough.  Needless to say, my wife’s not getting anywhere near me until we find out I’m clean.  And I’m sitting here thinking, wouldn’t it suck for this to be when my body decides to unlock some Wolverine-like healing power?

An Imagined Dialogue #1

For some reason, I have imaginary conversations with my children.  Some of these are the kinds of things you naturally think about way in advance, when you’re deluding yourself that you’re going to drop some serious wisdom that your teenager will actually listen to: the birds-and-the-bees talk, the you-should-get-out-and-explore-the-world talk, the “boys suck” talk when my daughter gets her heart broken for the first time.

But for some reason, I also imagine weird little vignettes where, apparently, I’ve lost my mind. Such as…

My daughter: Daddy, why do we have to go camping every year?

Me: Because one day in the not-too-distant future, the alleys of the cities shall be as charnel houses, where survivors  engage in a Thunderdome-like fight for survival and dominance, where the most prized possessions you can have are a blunt weapon, a can opener, and a papery husk where your soul and conscience used to be.  No, the only thing we’ll be able to call true existence — after our politicians and financial institutions and Interwebs have finally and truly failed us — will be a nomadic life in the wilderness away from the heaviest concentrations of cannibals,  C.H.U.D.’s, and  zombies.  You’ll need to know important things, little one, like how to sow a seed and raise it until it feeds you, trap an animal, and cover your tracks in the foothills.

Her: You don’t know how to do most of those things. You’ve just been reading The Road again. You always get weird when you read McCarthy.

Me: Fine. We’re going because it’s fun and because I said so.  Now go pack your backpack — and don’t forget your copy of The Road.  There’s going to be a quiz.

White purr!

We had a stray cat show up recently. A very sweet little white kitty that took up with us almost immediately.  Most strays that show up in our yard usually don’t stay very long.  But our cats didn’t seem to mind this little one — too much — so we let her stay, telling ourselves, “We gotta get her fixed if we’re gonna keep her. We gotta get her fixed if we’re gonna keep her.”  It didn’t hurt our cause that she didn’t run from our daughter, whose toddlerhood had already terrorized (in that toddlers want to be sweet but don’t know the meaning of the word “gentle” kind of way) our cats and the passel of cats at my mom’s.

We even let our daughter name the new kitty. In her very literal two-and-a-half-year-old way, she named the little white kitty … White.

Well, the time finally came when a tomcat we’d never seen before started sniffing around. My wife was on the phone to the vet immediately, and we set up an appointment to get White fixed, up-to-date on her shots, and generally checked out.

One thing about our vet’s office, and I’m not sure if others do this or not, but they refer to your animals as if they’re your children, calling them by their pet name in combination with your last name.  This is normally a little corny, but not something you really notice as your eyes are popping out of your head at the bill.  But White immediately struck me as different when I took her in.

For the sake of the story, we’ll say my last name is Jenkins.

Receptionist: What’s the cat’s name?
Me: Um, white.
R: Whitey?
Me: No, no, White (idly thinking, “that doesn’t sound much better”).
R: Oh, OK.
Me: We let our two-year-old name it…
R: Oh, OK. <gets on intercom> I need someone to come get White Jenkins!
Me (in my head): Oh my god, they’re going to think I’m some kind of crazed white supremacist!

At this point, a technician comes from the back: I’m here to get, uh, White Jenkins?
Me: Our two-year-old named it!
Her: Oh, OK.

And so it went as I answered her questions for the paperwork, and as I picked up the cat today.  On my way home that I realized, “Hey, our tabby cat’s named Axel! That sounds kinda Teutonic! Oh man…”  Never mind that we named him and his sister Axel and Rose because we thought it was funny. Rose had gotten run over a few years back, so the vet folks had probably forgotten all about her.  Now it was White, Axel, and … Squeak.  Well, I can’t think of anything bad about Squeak, except that maybe the combination of those three names — a color, an inanimate object, and a sound — don’t speak much for our imagination. You can only blame so much on a two-year-old, I guess.

But White’s doing well, if understandably a bit needy. I have no idea how to observe the vet’s instructions to keep the cat’s activities limited. If a cat wants to jump, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.