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My favourite character isn't on here. His name is also Nick, and he is a slimy con-artist in a leisure suit. It makes me feel like I am in character when I steal medkits and ammunition when the other survivors aren't looking.
My brother (Ben) and his wife (Jill) are pretty awesome. They bought me a copy of Left 4 Dead 2 for my birthday, and they bought it with express purpose of being able to play with them online so that I could join in on their zombie killing shenanigans.
If you are not familiar with this series of games, let me summarize:
You are one of four human survivors in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Your goal is to survive, working your way from one safehouse to the next, ultimately trying to get to a military evacuation point where you will (hopefully) be choppered away to safety. Everyone else is a zombie, and every zombie wants to curb-stomp you to death and eat your brains. Some of the zombies can strangle you with their tongues from 100 feet away. Some of them blow up and cover you with zombie-attracting puke. Some of the zombies spit corrosive acid. Some of them wear overalls (which is, in many ways, much scarier).
You and your three human buddies have to shoot, bludgeon, hack, and torch your way through the hordes of undead. If you wander off from the group, you will likely be picked off and eaten before you can say George A. Romero. You have to rely on your teammates to save your butt, patch you up with medkits, and not shoot you by accident too often.
Now, there is something funny about playing this game with my brother. We used to play this game called “What Would You Do If Society Crumbled?” We would plan out what sites in the neighbourhood would be strategically located for defense, where we could get guns, how much food we could horde, and who would get the title of “El Presidenté” (me) and who would get the title of “Warlord” (Ben). In some ways, Left 4 Dead 2 is like playing out the first few days of our hypothetical apocalypse.
But, as all good simulators do, Left 4 Dead 2 has also shown us where we might have some trouble.
- We are all spazzier than a bunch of cats with fireworks taped to their tales (not recommended). Every little noise sets off the entire group into a fit of random automatic fire, spraying bullets at walls, ceilings, windows, propane tanks, and the occasional low-flying bird.
- We are not great shots. There are a lot of friendly-fire incidents, most of which come from point #1, where we start running in front of each other’s fields of fire. There are also some really bad decisions being made in the heat of combat, like when I see Ben surrounded by zombies and I decide that I can “pick them off” by repeatedly firing my shotgun at the entire group.
- We don’t have a great collective sense of direction. And by that, I mean that I don’t have a good sense of direction, and I keep trying to lead people around. In the last outing, that meant that I led the lone computer-controlled player on our team (Coach) along a precarious catwalk “shortcut,” lost the rest of the team, fell 20 feet, sprained both ankles, and got us trapped in the far corner of an abandoned sugar mill. Ben and Jill had to rescue us both.
- I don’t relinquish control very well. Carrying on from point #3, I often try to grab control of the team. This happens every time that I play a game with my little brother since we have been gaming together since the days of the original Gameboy. I actually have to say, “You’re team leader,” to him at the beginning of each game (breaking the long-standing tradition of me being alpha dog), and we both know that the instruction is meant as much for my benefit as it is for his.
- Jill has a stronger sense of self-preservation than the rest of us. While trying to escape a carnival amphitheatre, everyone on the team except for Jill was incapacitated by one form of freaky zombie or another, but we were all still alive. Jill took one look at our three prone forms, flipped us off, and hopped in the helicopter to fly away to safety. Her laughter still echoes in my ears.
Jill always plays Rochelle, the sassy television production assistant and token female. She excels at witty one-liners and playing the gender card whenever we're down to the last clip of incidiary ammunition.
Now I know that this is only a game, but the zombie apocalypse could start at any point, leaving us surrounded by the undead with nothing to save us but our wits, a machete, and some scavenged firearms. All I know is that I am going run like a man on fire to keep up with my sister-in-law, because I now know that she won’t leave the door open for me if I lag behind.
(I’m so joking about that one, Jill. I’ll just “accidentally” shoot you in the calf to slow you down if I think you’re making a break for it.)
It’s Friday. Here is my week in review.
- A grade 8 student asked me if I was a certified teacher. I told her that I was. “Then why are you here?” she asked me, and then, being a lovely girl, she immediately turned red and stammered, “I’m sorry! That’s not what I meant to say at all!”
- I went to the pub with my wife, unborn child, and my dad. We couldn’t figure out why the place was so packed at 5:30 on a Thursday, with an Olympic symbol made out of hula-hoops and balloons everywhere, until we readthe note at our table about some local Olympian being sent off to Vancouver that night. CHCH news showed up and did a live bit while we were eating, so we watched the festivities on the big screen and tried to see if we were inadvertently being broadcasted in the background.
- I was informed that I could be competing in a martial arts tournament in the spring sometimes. My sensei is organizing it, and it will be ITF Taekwon Do rules, so I won’t be allowed to kick to the legs. That worries me, since during sparring I begin, end, and interject every combination I throw with leg kicks. I predict that I will be kicked in the head a lot if this tourney goes through.
- I met the world’s creepiest man, and he was a supply teacher.
- I discussed the gender, socio-economic, and artistic ideological assumptions that were present in Men’s Health magazine with a bunch of grade 8 students, and they completely blew my mind right out my ears. It was like talking to a bunch of post-grad students that hadn’t hit their growth spurts yet.
- I found out that someone I know has climbed Kilimanjaro.
- I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op and only spent $6.00. (I should get a medal for that one.)
- For the first time in months, I felt like I was actually doing something of value. Students are good for that sort of thing.
And, just for the fun of it, here is the test page for the graphic novel I am writing. It came about from many discussions about the name Luke Steel (the name of one of my friend’s children), and how dynamic an super-hero-esque it is. He was followed by another friend’s child (Caleb Dark, who obviously will have to be the villain), and then Luke’s little brother, Joshua Steel. It will also feature the two Wiesner boys, Dylan and TBA (possibly imbued with psychic powers), as well as my daughter, who is also unnamed, but who will totally be a ninja.
- What diabolical plan has Caleb Dark hatched up this time?
I don't care what this picture says. This baby is not normal. It's mother has been cut in half and appears to have been drained of all of her fluids.
Ignore everything I wrote on Monday. It’s crap. It is now February and I am still not working. I have been sick for the last two days and my creative output could only be described as a dribble if I were feeling really generous. My Hotmail account was fouled up for hours on Tuesday.
In fact, at this point, there is only one thing that makes me really happy right now: baby kicking.
Stop. Do not start yelling at me. I don’t mean kicking babies around like footballs. I don’t even mean gently prodding babies with your toes. (Maybe that’s a fun activity, but I have never tried it, so I don’t know.)
What I mean is when babies themselves start kicking, and in particular when the baby currently hiding inside my wife starts kicking.
It started out as just a few gentle pokes that were barely discernable from my wife’s involuntary abdominal twitches. But over the last month or two, Baby has been ramping it up. We’re now seeing some major spaz-outs, where Baby appears to be flailing with all of her limbs at once, along with solid hip checks and head-butts.
Of course, this begs the question of why she is deciding to go all Jackie Chan in utero. Are there things that just set her off into a fit of rage in there? Does she get annoyed when my wife’s kidneys are pumping too loudly? Is she frustrated by having to listen to her parent’s play Rockband with their friends? Does her right-of-center political bent get her all fired-up when MSNBC is on?
Maybe she’s dreaming. But again, what would she be dreaming about?
“Oh man, that was a messed-up dream! I was in my mom’s uterus, but it wasn’t really her uterus, you know? I mean, I know now that it was a different uterus, but at the time I was thinking, ‘This is totally my mom’s uterus.’ And the placenta was there, but it was different somehow. Spongier, maybe? I was talking to it, and it was talking back to me, which is weird because the placenta hardly ever talks to me these days.
“Anyway, we were talking about how I have this tube sticking out of my belly, and how when I grab it too hard, I get light headed. The placenta pointed out that I probably shouldn’t do that too much, and then everything started to shake. And that’s when I started to freak out. I woke up back in my mom’s uterus (the real one this time), and I felt kind of hungover, which is weird because I don’t drink and I’m not born yet.”
At this point, I can’t think of anything else that the baby could be dreaming about. I figure that the sensory input is limited to muffled noises and the occasional dim red light from when I project movies on my wife’s belly.
Three and a half years of getting my butt handed to me, week in, week out, to get one of these.
There’s a place out in Rancho Cucamonga called the Shark Tank. It, like man MMA training centres, is a place where men and women go to learn how to fight. Some of them compete professionally. Some of them train just for the hell of it.
The only reason that I know of this place (one of dozens that exist in the state of California alone) is from a short documentary feature that I watched years ago. In it, the head trainer held a brief court with his students in the middle of one of their workouts.
Now, your average MMA competitor is a reasonably tough customer. They have to be; when you train to get smashed in the face with anything from an elbow to a shin bone, you need to have a degree of grit that goes above the usual level of machismo. They have to endure gruelling workouts, intense conditioning, and hours of striking and grappling training. Even so, they are human, and they are just as capable of complaining as anyone else it seems.
While this documentary did not show the complaint that triggered the head trainer to pull his protégés together for a talk, it did show the fallout.
“Stop whining,” he told them (though I remember him using some different, less family-friendly words). “It is a privilege for you to be able to do this stuff. It’s a gift. There are people out there that can’t walk, that have spinal injuries, or leg injuries, or brain injuries. They would kill to be able to do what you are doing right now. Quit complaining to me that you’re tired, or that you are hurting. This is a gift.”
Part of me wants to come to the defense of the fighters, reminding the coach that some of them may be struggling with legitimate injuries or 12 hour work days, but then I look at my own life and my own complaints.
I’m like those guys. I whine a lot. I complain about everything. If my internet is down for more than 15 consecutive seconds, I throw a fit. When I have to drive slower than 80km/h on the highway I rant about the inconvenience of it all. Don’t even get me started on how I act when there aren’t any turkey sausages at the grocery store.
In short, I am everything that coach hates. I’m also everything that Louis C.K. hates:
There is so much amazing stuff in my life, and I am so privileged to be in it, that I really have no excuse for complaining about how I don’t have a job yet, or that I miss seeing my friends every day, or that I can’t go out and buy whatever I want when I want it like I could this time last year. My book is unpublished, my stories unread, but at least I can still write for my own edification. 150 years ago, literacy was kept from many because of the cost of lighting; you couldn’t afford candles enough to read by in the few dark hours where you where not working.
When she finally gets here, I want my daughter to see her father as someone that is ever thankful for what he has, ever amazed to be in a world that is cooler than anything he could even imagine, ever joyful that he gets to witness this tiny flicker in the grand stretch of eternity.
I had an odd experience this week. Emily Rose, my novel to which I have given over very little thought or time lately, has come back into my life in the strangest of ways.
As those of you who read regularly know, I have been volunteering at a local school for the last week and a half. It is a lovely place to be, full of teachers that actually care about their kids, kids that actually want to be in school, and Smart Boards. One of my host teachers was asking me about what I had been doing since I quit teaching at my old school, and the topic of writing came up. And while the phrase, “I’m writing a book,” comes up with roughly 90% of University graduates these days, I felt a tiny flicker of pride at being able to say that I actually finished writing mine.
Of course, the flicker was quickly stomped upon as I hurriedly explained that it was neither published nor even on the horizon of going global.
Nevertheless, this teacher (bless her heart) wanted to know more about Emily Rose, particularly where it had come from in the first place. And strangely, I can answer that question succinctly and without philosophizing about muses and substance abuse. Emily Rose came from here:
- Where everything started.
This picture became the seed for so much of what the story became. There was an older, rougher sketch of it somewhere, one that I had drawn many months before I had really got into writing this book, but I have since lost that one in the stacks of notes, drawings, and maps.
Now, when I mentioned this picture to my host teacher, she became very animated. She asked if I would be willing to bring in the manuscript and the picture for the students to see, maybe even teach a writing lesson by examining the value of imagery as inspiration. Within a few minutes of discussion, we had hashed out a plan to use with two different classes, and that night Emily Rose was dusted off and packed into my MEC Deluxe Bookbag©.
A classroom full of kids is a funny thing. Standing in front of them can be simultaneously the most terrifying and most edifying thing in the world. They can be merciless, ruthless, and cutting. But they can also be inspiring, supportive, and brilliant. Sometimes they manage to be both at once. So often, I have stood before them and allowed myself to be vulnerable, knowing that they hold my entire self-worth in their hands, and they have never taken advantage of that.
These kids were no exception. They don’t really know me that well. They could easily have laughed at my silly picture, rolled their eyes, ignored my lesson. But even the grade 8s, those teen-aged paragons of indifference and scorn, chose instead to engage, drawing out the threads of my novel from clues in the picture, finding conflict and plot and setting and meaning, allowing me to take them through the process of building an imaginary world full of real people. One girl asked if she could read my manuscript, and encouraged me not to give up on getting Emily Rose published.
The grade 6s went even deeper down the rabbit hole. By the end of the 30 minutes with them, I was thinking that the class could have collectively summarized my entire novel with nothing more than that picture up on the screen. They laughed and questioned and theorized in ways that you would not expect from children.
Most importantly, they reminded me of the value of telling stories.
I really do not believe that this was the best person they could find to sell such a brilliant product.
I finally got to use a Smart Board today.
For reasons that I truly do not understand, I have somehow made it through 4 years of full time teaching without ever getting my hands on a Smart Board. I have made do with your usual Dumb Boards, both white and black, and with all of their flaws and issues, not even thinking that the technology could possibly live up to the hype.
But all it took was 15 minutes of goofing around with one of these things to realize that I have been missing out. My teaching has been Palaeolithic up until this moment. I might as well have been drawing diagrams with burnt sticks on rock walls.
Please see the following chart for further proof.
Do you remember that scene in The Matrix: Reloaded where the operators of Zion’s defence system were sitting in a white room, dragging images on invisible interfaces with the touch of a finger? Of course you don’t, because that movie was ultimately very forgettable, and didn’t hold a candle to the first Matrix.
But if you were to go watch it again and look for that scene amidst the blundering dialogue and D-grade acting, you would see something like what I experienced today: a future of gigantic touch screens and intuitive programming and the ability to drag a picture of George W. Bush from the internet, drop it on the board in your classroom, and draw a moustache and glasses on him to make him look stupid.
Which I did.
And it was awesome.
| Blackboard (Dumb) | Whiteboard (Less Dumb) | Smart Board (Smart) |
| · Writing utensils limited to white chalk and a series of pastel colours that are unreadable from further than 3 feet | · Writing utensils limited to specially designed markers that are good for roughly 10 linear feet of writing, but only if they are capped properly before they are exposed to the air for more than 7 seconds | · Writing magically appears from four colours of inert “space pencils” that have ergonomic ridges and never run out of ink |
| · Powdery residue from chalk gets on hands, face, pants, shirt, and the inside of your lungs | · Markers smear off into a gray grime that coats your hands and face until you look like an Edwardian coal miner | · Magical surface is grime and powder free, and smells vaguely of lilacs |
| · Washing the board requires erasing, ragging, re-ragging, spritzing, squeegeeing, and drying, and ultimately still ends up looking like crap | · Washing requires the use of special board cleaning chemicals that leave you high but not euphoric, not even when you sniff them directly | · Hit the “Clear” button for a pristine surface |
| · Once erased, material must be rewritten or lost forever | · See Blackboard (left) | · Undo button |
| · Save button | ||
| · Unless the user is an incredibly fast animator, videos must be shown by using a separate projector system and screen | · White surface works a bit like a video screen, but reflects most of the image back at the students, temporarily blinding them | · Open Window Media player |
| · Hit Play |
She may be a bit plain, but damn can she boil a cabbage!
Loath as I am to fall into the blogging trap of moaning and complaining about everything, I am so tired today that I can barely think. I made the mistake of sleeping in and taking a nap yesterday and it blew my sleep schedule right out of the water like the last red peg at the end of my aircraft carrier. I think I might have cobbled together a solid fifteen minutes of REM before I rolled out of bed this morning.
The day passed in a blur. At some point I think that I helped teach… something… to… some kids… I can’t really place it right now, but I have the Collected Poems of Kim Jong Il in my backpack now, and I don’t know where it came from.
I don’t remember my drive home at all. When I pulled into the driveway, I noticed that car was covered in mud and the remains of some animal were still twitching on the front grill, but that thing could have climbed on my car and exploded while the Corolla was parked at school for all I know. Some animals just do that sort of thing. Animals like the Eastern Explosive Marmot (Marmota Powpowica), for example.
My key didn’t work, so I jimmied open my back window and clambered into the living room. I could have sworn that it was on the other side of the house yesterday, but my wife and I have been moving the furniture around a bit, so that may just be my imagination. And I don’t remember putting cabbage soup on to boil before I left for work, but it’s very possible that I did, since nothing smells better than coming home to house that reeks of farts.
Some woman that I assume was my wife came at me as soon as I had picked myself up off the kitchen floor and shut the jimmied window. She kept yelling at me about something, but in my state of extreme sleep deprivation it was just a lot of noise that sounded like:
“Кто вы? Выйдите моей дома!”
“Don’t get your babushka in a knot,” I snapped at her, wondering why she was wearing a babushka and why she was brandishing a rolling pin like a weapon. “I just need to go have a shower. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Выйдите, вы идиот!” she yelled at me as I slowly climbed the stairs.
(That’s my wife for you; always yelling in Cyrillic.)
I think I fell asleep in the shower, because I woke up on the floor tangled in the shower curtain and covered in soapsuds. I got up, towelled off the scum, saluted the picture of Stalin that I don’t remember installing over the toilet, and went downstairs to have a nice relaxing dinner of boiled cabbage.
I won’t lie to you: conversation with my wife that night was tense. She kept saying, “Остановите съесть мою капусту, ишака,” and I kept telling her that she needed to learn how to communicate better, since all I heard was “blaski, blaski, blaski.” I finally got fed up and stormed downstairs to go write on the computer.
I don’t like to complain about my wife, but it’s like I don’t even know her anymore.
Little rubber boots / for little tiny feet / for tromping in the mud / that she'll likely want to eat.
I had an interesting discussion with someone the other day. In this person’s classroom, she has made a real effort to develop intrinsic motivation with the students. What this means in a practical sense is that she has worked to take away the reward and punishment systems that normally accompany education: the “carrot at the end of the stick” model, the “cheese in the maze” model, or (my favourite) the “lone After Eight mint in the box full of empty wrappers” model.
When I was in school, everything was built around the idea that if you accomplished some quantifiable goal, you gained some tangible reward (free time, a game of dodgeball, access to the school’s cannon). Likewise, if you didn’t do what you were supposed to there was a strong likelihood of punishment (a call home, a trip to the principal’s office, firing squad).
And while I would usually say that it is far easier to control a classroom full of kids that has been trained to the specificities of a reward and punishment system (as one might train a room full of yappy puppies), there is something to be said for sending students out into the real world with the belief that good work should be done for the sake of good work, not merely for monetary compensation. These kids will hopefully approach their lives with the goal of trying to find their calling, not just something to do to pay the bills. They will value quality of life, not quantity of things.
In this discussion, I referenced my father’s life. He always provided for my brother and me, and I certainly do not judge his career path for that reason alone, but he did spend a lot of his time manoeuvring his way across an exhausting game of Corporate Snakes and Ladders. After what seems like decades of school, he built his reputation, built his network, was transferred and promoted and transferred again, went from law to sales to management, and ultimately found himself in a daily drive 3 hour drive to put in 14 hour work days.
Then his heart stopped working.
It wasn’t a heart attack, which is what one normally associates with this kind of a story (along with ulcers and alcohol abuse). Instead, his heart simply stopped pumping for several seconds at a time. He described the feeling as a bit of a flutter. (I think I would describe the feeling as “momentary death,” but it’s never happened to me, so I don’t know). The doctor hooked up a nifty little machine to him to see what was going on, let it run for a day or so, read the results, and promptly told my father to get to the nearest hospital as quickly as the laws of physics would allow.
The first thing I said to him when I saw him in the hospital was, “How the %^&* did you not notice that your heart was stopping for 6 seconds at a time?”
(Seriously, count to 6 “Mississippily” and see how long that is to be without a pulse.)
After getting a pacemaker installed, my father changed a lot of things in his life. Step one was to quit his job and find something that wouldn’t kill him. He moved into a totally different field, one that allows him to set his own hours and limits his rush hour driving. He has time to play with his dogs, go for walks with his wife, dig in his gardens, and find tiny rubber boots for his impending granddaughter.
I don’t know if he would look back and change anything about the way things happened to bring him to where he is now; I don’t think of him as someone that lives with many regrets. I do know that he is happier than I have ever seen him. I know that he brightens up every time that I remind him that he will be grandfather. He has time to visit his sons, talk to his family, take trips to on his motorcycle, and keep up with his ever-present piles of The Economist and The Globe and Mail.
Maybe some of the kids in my friend’s classroom will bypass the years of overtime and heart stoppages. Maybe they will be able to find something that pays the bills but also makes them deliriously happy to do. And if they can’t find that, I hope that they at least find a bearable job that gives them time and freedom enough to enjoy the unquantifiable things in their lives.
It's called lunchtime roulette. You pick an unlabeled can and take it to work for lunch. It's much more fun than the Russian version, but just about as dangerous.
One of my greatest fears in life is being in a place where I don’t know anyone, don’t know where to find things, and don’t know the daily routines that everyone takes for granted. As such, the absolute worst scenario for me is the first day on a new job, or, in this case, the first day volunteering at a new school.
You see, there are not a lot of ways to get on to the supply list (short of nepotism and several of the more important planets lining up in your favour), so in this particular board, you make your contacts by offering to go in an help out at your local school. I actually don’t mind this too much, since I have spent the last six months in a state of almost complete social isolation, but it then leads me to a position of having to walk into a group of established people, not knowing anyone’s names, not knowing where any of the rooms are, and not knowing what time things start and end.
The panic I felt on Monday morning as I prepared for this was nothing short of mind-boggling.
And my idiot body-brain pairing loves to respond to stress by keeping me awake all the live-long night. So when Monday morning rolled along, I was sleep-deprived to the point that I would likely have failed a sobriety test. I stumbled, bleary-eyed, from the bed to the shower, then to the dresser. At that point, something broke.
It sounded like glass.
I hollered down to my wife, “Are you okay?”
She hollered back up at me, “Yeah. I just broke a glass though.”
“Did you sweep it up?”
“No. I don’t have time. I’ll just pick up the big pieces. Just don’t step near the dishwasher.”
“What?”
“Just don’t step near the dishwasher. That’s where it broke.”
I thought about this statement. Our kitchen isn’t terribly big. All of it is near the centrally located dishwasher.
“Are you joking?” I asked.
“Bye!”
(Sound of front door shutting.)
I grumbled something to myself about Die Hard and bare feet, then went about figuring out what to wear.
The panic welled up in me again. I didn’t know the school’s dress code. When I went in for a tour, the principal was wearing a suit, but the teacher I would be working with was wearing jeans. Other teachers had been wearing yoga pants, but then one of the guys had had a bow tie on.
My head spun with the ramifications of making the wrong decision. If I over-dressed, I would come off as a pompous twit; if I under-dressed, a slob. I dug through the closet, hoping to find something to balance that fine line between cast-off formal and dapper casual, which I think ended up being a pair of brown pants, sneakers, a tuxedo jacket, a pair of white gloves, a golf shirt, and a cravat.
Now that I was outfitted in just the right balance of… something, I could worry about packing a lunch. I tromped downstairs, trying to stick my cravat to my golf shirt with a novelty tiepin, when I stopped dead, foot in the air like Ralph Macchio circa 1984.
A chunk of broken glass stared back at me, the morning sun winking off of its razor edges.
(It was nowhere near the dishwasher, by the way.)
I did my best India Jones impersonation by stepping lightly from one (hopefully) clear tile to the next, reached the cupboard with the dust pan and broom, and carefully swept up every square inch of the kitchen floor. I discovered three more shards, but these were the nasty little bastards that could hide in the grout.
The floor now free of crippling hazards, I looked around for something to take for lunch. As I said before, it’s been six months since I’ve had a proper 9-5, so the kitchen was more suited to shut-in meals (instant noodles and pogos) than to brown baggers. I grabbed the bread from the pantry.
Half of it was green. And it was not the kind of “scrapable” green that is just sitting on top. This stuff had dug in for a long, WWI style war of attrition. I decided to let it win and threw it out.
So lunch became a collection of random food items piled together in the hopes that I could behind them while no one talked to me at lunch. Granola bar, hunk of cheese, cookies, half an eggplant, brown sugar, and a can that had lost its label but that may have held lima beans. Or possibly gravy.
I found out later that day that it was neither.
A wise woman once said that the only purpose of baby feet is to be cute. I heartily agree.
This whole baby thing has clearly started to affect me.
On Thursday night, as I was forced to watch Private Practice (a show that I generally avoid like the plague), I found myself brought to tears by a scene where a distraught father had to apologize to his 8-year-old daughter. The sight of her breaking into tears while he asked for her forgiveness for not letting her to see her meth-addicted mother before she died somehow got me crying.
Why?
There is a tenuous connection there, I guess. I am having a little girl in about 17 weeks. I don’t ever want her to be mad at me (even though I know that she will be at some point). I don’t want to ever make her cry.
But it isn’t as though anything at all about that situation was applicable to me. My wife is not a meth addict, dealer, or producer. She is unlikely to blow herself up while operating a meth still. She hasn’t exposed our unborn child to any noxious chemicals so that she can profit from the drug addictions of others.
I mean, not that I know of, of course.
So while I sat there, blubbering, in front of my wife and her friend Jenn, I came to a conclusion:
I am going to be a useless dad.
I don’t mean this in the sense that I won’t change diapers or wipe noses or drive our baby to Jiu Jitsu classes (not until she’s like three or four years old, obviously). I plan on being involved with her school, taking her on long walks, and braiding her hair with well-intentioned ham-handedness. I will make her meals and sing her to sleep, colour pictures with her, make Play Doh flowers, help her chase frogs around her Grandpa’s pond, and carry her on my shoulders.
The problem is going to come about when she starts to cry.
I just don’t know what to do with crying people. It is very selfish of me, since I cry all the time about the stupidest things. (“Why would you keep her away from her dying, meth-explosion-burned mother, you heartless bastard? Is your heart made of coal?”) My usual inclination is to throw a blanket over anyone that is crying in the hopes that they will think it’s night time and fall asleep. (So far this has only worked on parrots and one especially slow fifth-grader.)
And I know that this kid is going to cry. I know she will. They always do.
And when she cries, I know that I am just going to give in to whatever silly whim or request that she wants. I have this sinking feeling that she will be able to use this against me well into her twenties, her eyes welling up and her lip quivering until I just hand over my wallet or car keys or crossbow and mutter something about not telling her mother about it.
