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What's the dumbest thing you did in 2010?
"The dumbest thing you did ..." is actually a series started last year by Kelly Mills. This part of my 2011 initiative to get her to write for The Poop again. I'm going to keep stealing her ideas until she starts contributing posts out of pure frustration. (If that doesn't work, I'm going to kidnap her dog.)
burielectric.com
At least I didn't get electricuted ...
Looking back at my own dumbest things I did in 2010, I'm both embarrassed and satisfied. There were a lot of idiotic acts to choose from, but very little collateral damage to the public at large. I figure it's a good year if I'm pretty much the only one who suffered from my stupidity.
Last year was a year of sleep deprivation in my household, and I think it shows in my list. Two of these mistakes wouldn't have happened if I was averaging more than five hours of sleep per night. I think it's also notable that only one of the items involved damage to myself. During the typical year, physical injury is the entire list.
My dumbest things I did in 2010 are below. Yours in the comments.
(You can write what you want, including the ever-popular "the dumbest thing I did is read your column" response. But I'm hoping that people keep this kind of light. If you robbed an Old Navy or ran over a crosswalk full of old ladies or cheated on your wife while she was eight months pregnant with twins, you might want to skip the comments and tell it to your counselor/priest/fellow inmates.) Read More 'What's the dumbest thing you did in 2010?' »
| January 07 2011 at 06:10 AM
Parenting humilation: accidentally using kid talk with adults
My wife and I have never been big on the baby talk thing. Our pet names for each other are "husband" and "wife." We tend to talk to our children like we talk to each other. But there have been a few kid words -- "tummy" for stomach, "jammies" for pajamas -- that have snuck into the household lexicon. And unfortunately, there are times when are kids are nowhere near us, and we keep using them.
katandpat.com
Nigh-night stars. Nigh-night cars. Nigh-night overpriced San Francisco bars ...
Nine times out of 10 in these situations, I stop myself before the word comes out of my mouth. Twice in the last year, I caught myself mid-sentence as I began to tell my pick-up basketball teammates "Hold up -- I've got to run to the potty."
While I'm thankful the word "potty" has never been spoken in mixed company, I have slipped up several times in front of my wife. I've thrown out several "pee-pee"s and at least one "blankey." And we have inadvertantly adopted words that my sons use because they can't pronounce an object. For example, computer = bococo and umbrella = uh-bluh-bluh. As in "It's looking ugly outside. Have you seen the uh-bluh-bluh?"
Like I said, I've been pretty lucky so far in public. Except for that time at Jillian's in San Francisco two months ago -- a night which I've been trying to pretend never happened.
More on that below. Your kid talk slip-ups in the comments ... Read More 'Parenting humilation: accidentally using kid talk with adults' »
| January 04 2011 at 06:03 AM
A shout-out to the dads of Christmas
Moms get a lot of credit at this time of year. They often carry the load on shopping, baking, card-sending and present-wrapping.
But when I think of Christmas, I think of my dad, starting with helping him put up the outside lights. He was an engineer by training, so he executed his task with an engineer's precision. We had no giant inflatable snow globes (Target hadn't come into existence yet) or 3-D Santa scenes, just the lights, masterfully strung along the architectural lines of our house and symmetrically scalloped across our balcony.
sivallighting.com
He brought the same exactitude to stringing the indoor tree lights, aiming to place them so that the wires would not be visible, and basically achieving this. He had been a stage actor and occasional theater lighting tech before he had kids, and our living room was his stage every December.
One year -- I think I was 6 -- my parents were having financial difficulties and couldn't afford to buy us a lot of stuff, so my father got out his old acting trunk and filled it with costumes and other hand-me-downs good for playing dress-up, like my grandmother's fox stole with the fox's face at the clasp (PETA didn't exist yet either) and bits of makeup he and my mother had used professionally (they met in a production of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit"). My father painted on the trunk lid in perfect Palmer script, "The McMahon Sisters," as if we were some vaudeville act about to play Peoria. It was my most memorable Christmas gift ever.
Read More 'A shout-out to the dads of Christmas' »| December 21 2010 at 09:30 AM
Festivus for the rest of us ...
Oh my poor daughter, product of Bay Area hippyism (and I'm beginning to think that's exactly what's become of me).
She considers herself a Jew. Yet she loves nothing more than attending our neighborhood Catholic church with her grammy, who is practically the next in line to be Pope. And then at home she has to deal with me, the hyper atheist who probably scares her with stories of evolution gone awry. With this melting pot of beliefs swirling around inside her, I have a feeling she's going to grow up and make your every day Unitarian Universalist seem too restrictive.
mrl.nyu.edu
This pretty much explains our household this year.
We lit our first Menorah candles for Chanukah this week, my wife and I doing our best to find the right process and prayers online, while our 4 year old Rabbinical scholar pointed out all our errors. For the past few years, she's attended a lovely Jewish preschool and has come to identify herself as Jewish. When I told her that Jews don't celebrate Christmas, she said, "Well, not THAT Jewish" -- which is just about the same reaction my Jewish friends have when presented with a bacon doughnut. Still, she knew enough to critique our Hebrew and remind us which candles to light first. So we've been respectful of her beliefs.
Earlier this year, my wife made a traditional Seder for Passover. And this month, we'll still be lighting the Menorah on the same night we plug in the Christmas tree. Every morning in December Emmeline goes to her Advent calendar to open a tiny gift or sweet on the march toward Christmas, and then in the evening we spin the dreidel, feasting on gelt. Read More 'Festivus for the rest of us ...' »
| December 02 2010 at 11:55 AM
When do you start putting out Christmas decorations?
When it comes to Christmas decorations, I'm one of those people who becomes a cranky old man as the holiday themes start appearing earlier and earlier every year. Since I spend about 20 percent of my free time at Target, that store receives the focus of my ire. I'm guessing they've been rolling out holiday decorations the day after Halloween for years, but my outrage always has a short-term memory. (My wife endured another long diatribe a week and a half ago when the Christmas wrapping appeared where the costumes used to be.)
Too early?
I don't hate Christmas -- far from it. In my head, I'm trying to save the holiday. When people start celebrating at the end of October, and then keep their tree up until February, I would argue that it only serves to dilute the Christmas spirit. With my wife's approval, we've always honored the holiday with a slow build-up starting the day after Thanksgiving, and then a no-nonsense ornament removal on Jan. 2. Kicking the tree to the curb that early always feels a little bit like tough love, but there's something satisfying, too. The tree is suffering once the calendar hits 2011. It wants me to put it down.
I also do it out of fairness to the other holidays. From a relaxation point of view, I think Thanksgiving is the best holiday ever. It seems mean to let Christmas steal some of the focus off of football, gluttony and family dysfunction.
I budged a little last Friday, when my editor David Wiegand handed me a small live Christmas tree with wrapping paper around the base. It was promoting something on ABC Family (hopefully the underrated "Prep & Landing") which was no longer attached to the tree. David and I get all manner of strange stuff sent to us, so this gesture wasn't unusual. He knows my kids, and probably figured it was something one of them would like in their room. Later we could plant it in the yard and make it a teaching moment.
Read More 'When do you start putting out Christmas decorations?' »| November 18 2010 at 07:20 AM
The glorious return of the high five
When I stopped high-fiving on a regular basis, as a teen in the late 1980s, I couldn't have been more certain that this small part of my life was gone forever.
thisrecording.files.wordpress.com
It's making a comeback ...
It was the same little voice that told me I would never go through another Bryan Adams phase, and would never wear an article of clothing with a video game character on it again. Sure, I might do these things ironically, as part of a Halloween costume or an '80s easy rock mix at a theme party. But there was no force of culture or nature that was going to turn me into a high-fiving, Pac Man belt-wearing "Heaven"-listening-to adult. It would be like Mark Wahlberg, at the peak of his serious acting career, getting the Funky Bunch together again.
And yet here I am, a grown man, high-fiving more than ever. I've high-fived more times in the last week than I did in all of the 1990s combined. I high-five my children, other people's children, my wife and strangers. At one point a few months ago, I spontaneously high-fived "Superbad" co-star Christopher Mintz-Plasse during a Q&A; related to the movie "Kick-Ass." This was even more horrifying later when I transcribed the tape. While it's possible he put his hand up first (McLovin seems like a high-fiving kind of guy), I distinctly heard my voice on the tape saying "Dude. High five!" before the audible slap.
This is definitely a parenting thing. There's a lot to get excited about when your children are at the age of 18 months, but their fine motor skills are limited. Teaching complicated dance moves from the movie "House Party" is out of the question. So at some point, every parent reaches into the database of their subconscious, and comes up with the simplest celebratory gesture imaginable. "High five!" Read More 'The glorious return of the high five' »
| November 11 2010 at 07:22 AM
NFL RedZone, and other things I'm looking forward to when I'm retired
I try not to complain publicly when things get really busy in my life. A lot of people who read The Poop have very stressful family and job situations. And if you're welding the new Bay Bridge in the middle of the night for a living, I'm guessing the last thing you want to hear is a lot of bitching from the guy who wrote "The Five Greatest Cosby Sweaters of All Time."
droid-life.com
The greatest time suck ever invented?
So I'll just note that I haven't had a ton of free time lately. My wife is getting her master's degree, we're both working full time and I have a couple of side writing projects. As a result, I've reached parenting critical mass. During my rare moments of free time when I'm not working or with the kids, I feel guilty about having nothing to do. It's becoming impossible to watch a three-week-old episode of "30 Rock" without folding some laundry to feel productive.
There was a time when I spent a good 40 percent of my week with nothing to do. The peak came in the 1990s during a 4 1/2-year stint working in Hollywood, when my responsibilities on a typical weekend might be a half hour of dishwashing and a trip to the post office. At least one weekend a month during this non-kids, non-wife mostly non-girlfriend time, I would come home on Friday with absolutely zero plans for the weekend. (Looking back, this seems phenomenally lazy. Why wasn't I more productive during those hours? I should have built a log cabin or something.)
Some day I'm going to know what it feels like to be frivolous with my time again. In the meantime, I'm making a lot of plans.
Below are six activities I look forward to participating in when I'm retired* and the kids are out of the house. Yours in the comments.
Read More 'NFL RedZone, and other things I'm looking forward to when I'm retired' »| October 18 2010 at 07:12 AM
My son won't stop talking about "Star Wars"
Being a parent is about patience and selflessness and compromise. It's also, I'm learning, about being careful what you wish for. After years of hoping that my son would some day become a "Star Wars" fan like his father (insert Darth Vader breathing here), I'm worried that I might actually lose my sanity during one of our daily question and answer sessions about the space opera.
thebothanspy.com
Did he subcontract the Rancor job?
Many of my 5-year-old's questions are good ones, and in the beginning I could always provide an answer. As a lifetime "Star Wars" geek who had seen the original trilogy at least a dozen times, I felt like the smartest guy on the planet. Why yes, son, I do know how many AT-STs there were in the Battle of Endor. Want me to draw you a topographical map of the battlefield?
Other questions didn't have obvious answers, but I rolled with them. Here's one exchange that I was so proud of, I immediately wrote it down:
Son: "Speaking of Jabba, how exactly did Jabba get the Rancor in without it eating Jabba?"
Me: "You know how we hired Quang to put in our flagstone in the back yard, because I broke my hand when I tried to do it? Jabba probably hired some kind of Rancor specialist. He was probably out on his sail barge and didn't lift a finger."
These were the good months, when my son and I had a clear master/apprentice relationship thing going on. Then he discovered The Dark Side the storylines of the three newer movies, which I'm much less familiar with, and his impetuousness started to show. (It's a hard thing to hear your own son use his Luke Skywalker/"power converters" voice for the first time.) Finally, he learned about the characters from the "Clone Wars" animated series through online videos promoting his favorite Lego sets. Now we're basically speaking two different languages. Read More 'My son won't stop talking about "Star Wars"' »
| October 14 2010 at 07:06 AM
Child development phases that no one tells you about ...
My 2-year-old son has a pet name for me. From what I can tell, he came up with it himself. He sometimes call me "dada" or "dad" or even "Peter." But mostly when I wake him up, he greets me with an enthusiastic ...
"Hi, pee-pee dada!"
mlb.mlb.com
Every parent fears the Darren Baker phase ...
He's also called me "pee-pee dada" when I drop him off at the babysitter, make him breakfast and attend events where large numbers of people gather such as PTA meetings. It doesn't matter whether I'm doing something nice or not. We're thinking of going back to Disneyland next year. I have no doubt I'll be called "pee-pee dada" in the Magic Kingdom. (I find it especially hurtful when he calls me "pee-pee dada" after I just paid a bunch of bills.)
I can tell by the satisfied look on his face that he didn't just string together a couple of random syllables, that happen to be a synonym for urine. He also occasionally calls me "poo-poo dada," which is not only much, much worse, but in my opinion proves premeditation.
It got me thinking about the stages that kids go through that nobody tells you about. While we all hear about the Terrible Twos and the rebellious teen years, there's no warning about the phase where your children start hiding your car keys, will only eat food that's orange or insist on calling you by degrading names in public.
Below are some challenges involving my kids that I wish someone told me about. I have two boys, and stipulate that parents with girls may have completely different phases. Most of them involving "The Little Mermaid." Yours in the comments ... Read More 'Child development phases that no one tells you about ...' »
| October 08 2010 at 08:22 AM
What makes you feel old?
I joined the PTA on Thursday. On the face of it, this was an extraordinarily pain-free experience. Nobody in the room matched the busybody judgmental stereotype that has unfairly maligned the PTA since this came out more than 40 years ago. There were a lot more dads at the PTA sign-ups in my kindergarten-age son's school cafeteria than I was expecting. My wife even filled out all of the forms and made out a check ahead of time. All I really did was hand over an envelope and eat a free croissant. Boom! I was in the PTA.
8cpassport.com
Making it look way too easy ...
But as I walked away, suddenly I felt a familiar combination of joint pain and depression, that comes whenever I get a reminder of crushing reality of my mortality. "I'm way too young to be in the PTA," I said to a mother from my son's class who I've become friends with. "I mean, I still rock ..."
Much like the things that make me excited as a parent, the things that make me feel old have come from out of nowhere. For example, turning 40 didn't faze me at all. Neither did the moment at age 22 that I realized I was losing my hair. But stupid things like joining the PTA or learning that Ronnie Lott has a son who plays in the NFL can make me feel like curling into the fetal position and listening to Smiths albums.
Four things that make me feel really old are below. Yours in the comments. (I realize I'm kind of asking for it with this post, but I'm hoping this stays pretty light-hearted. If things get too gloomy, I've got a good Sunshine and Rainbows for later this afternoon or tomorrow ...)
1. Swinging on the monkey bars If you're an adult who hasn't tried to swing from the monkey bars since you were a kid, please head to your nearest school or park, and attempt to negotiate at least two of the rings or rungs. Even if you're in pretty good shape, it feels like you're hanging from a rack with giant sandbags attached to each ankle. I was an extremely wimpy 7-year-old, and I could swing around the playground like a little spider monkey. I was like Stallone in "Cliffhanger." Now I can't get from one ring to the other without feeling like I'm being drawn and quartered and both of my shoulders are about to dislocate. Read More 'What makes you feel old? ' »
| September 20 2010 at 06:42 AM
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