At this time last year, Wife was clutching her enormous belly and trying not to poop out a baby on our nice white couch. Our couch was located in our apartment in Boston, which we could no longer afford.
And now...Child is a year old tomorrow, Wife's belly is so taught you can bounce quarters off it, and I'm gainfully employed by one of the few non-profits not completely decimated by Bernie Madoff and his band of Shylocks - making Jewish stereotypes persist for another thousand years! - living in an apartment we can afford in Pittsburgh.
This is not a list of resolutions. Nor is this all cheesy about Child somehow surviving his first year with me as his father. If you want me to be honest with you, this is a post crafted out of guilt and obligation to cover my ass while I jet off to LA for a week to watch Brother S may a girl that's WAY out of his league. Don't you feel the love all over? Sorry, that's a rash. You should get that looked at.
A friend mocked me this week for not watching one of the 754 bowl games. It could be that I was instead watching the Devil Wears Prada (how come no one told me that's not the movie where Anne Hathaway gets naked?). Or it could be that college football is a poor excuse for a genre of sport. It's nowhere near as compelling as the NFL, the skill level is exponentially lower, and the BCS system is so bad that Obama won the election simply by saying he'd fix it. There might have been other reasons, but I don't remember what they were. Something about hope, or dope. Were we promised a bong in every home?
Anywhoo, college football blows unless it's overtime. They have the single greatest overtime system in sports. Better than hockey's shootout. Better than your extra innings. Better than your closest-croquet-mallet-to-the-testicles-wins croquet. Even better than cricket's Animal House-style ass-whacking Rochambeaux. It's exciting, each team gets a fair shot, and the score runs up absurdly into the 70-64 range. Plus there's no punting, and we all know punting is for pussies who play rugby.
Meanwhile, I'm reading Beckett and this guy Gary Lutz. If you've ever read either one, you will wonder why the hell I'm reading both at the same time. Well Watt is funny, no doubt about it. But it's also dense, and boring, and not a whole lot's happening right now. So sue me, I got antsy. So I picked up Lutz only to discover that he treats English like a salad. He tosses some verbs here and there, and thinks adjectives are just super over anything, without regard to context, or definition. So you'll get a sentence like
"I disturbed the pages of my newspaper, spoiling them, melancholizing them with sudden prosperities of eyesight, despecificating the stories until all that was still binding in them was a vague and ungiving sense of people motioning dimly toward me from within their own cumbersome towns."
What the fuck does that mean? It makes me feel stupid, and jealous, and exhilarated. Turns out, I enjoy things that make me feel like an idiot.
E.g., being a dad. Child went through a period of eating nothing but frozen pancakes and waffles. Couldn't get enough. And then we got a note home today - "Please do not send any more frozen pancakes or waffles. They make him scream." Well alrighty then. Of course, Child will eat just about anything if you distract him with fun toys like paper, or a magnet. So we tag team him for dinner - Wife shoves food into his mouth, and I try to do the weirdest, most bizarre things I can to keep Child's attention until he realizes he's full. He lets us know by vomiting.
On Sunday we get on a plane to fly across the country. Child has flown before, but never for this long. Can anyone tell me how much Benadryl - aka baby heroin - will it take for us to make it to LA with our sanity intact? One bottle? Three? In the meantime I'll try to remember funny things about the trip, and maybe when I return I'll regale you with tales of the Left Coast, and all their vegan hilarity.
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4 comments:
I'm not sure I can trust anything you say anymore because I spot a lie in your post!! You did not have a white couch in your apartment in Boston...it was greenish, I think. Very comfortable. And I think at least one of my kids threw up on it once or twice.
Can't believe your kids is a year old and we have yet to see him. It's just wrong.
its all true, i mocked charles about his watching bride shows on TLC instead of college football, and that means everything else he wrote is true
Maybe the couch was white before the kids threw up on it? Or maybe "fancy" people just have artistic license and can make up things as they please.
1) Maybe if Emily hadn't fled the country under suspicious circumstances, she'd know about the Story of the Free Couch. Instead all she gets is quality shwarma.
2) Fancy people, such as myself, get to do whatever they want. Cf. the time I yelled bomb on a plane. Hilarity! And anal cavity searches!
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