Observational Tragedy

The Little Mermaid
Wants to marry Prince Eric
Needs vagina first

Each morning, I ask my three-year-old if she had any dreams last night. She usually says she dreamed about "cookies and horsies" because she knows I think that's funny. Sometimes she elaborates, and the horsies were eating the cookies, or the cookies were hiding from the horsies, etc. This morning she asked me if I had any dreams. I lied and said I couldn't remember any. Because how do explain to a child your dream about having sex with a deaf woman on an airplane? You don't. Simple as that. 

YouTube has tremendous room for improvement. Google needs to get in there and roll some heads - especially now that they're integrating video with AdSense. (I tried signing up today; I hated how I had to leave the AdSense site to log into YouTube and "link" my accounts. Can't they do that automatically? Now my status is "pending" - for up to 12 HOURS.)

Like a lot of companies, mine is testing the waters with YouTube, and I've been tasked with setting up our corporate YouTube page. I thought it would be easy - millions of people do it, right? - and it's not, not at all. And I'm not some noob; I build websites and stuff. Useless help files; cryptic, "sorry, not available" error messages; counterintuitive interface; lack of flexibility (Um, why can't I choose what image I want to put next to my company name? Why do viewers leave my channel when they click a video thumbnail?) -- it's a mess. It's not terrible, but it could be better, and it comes nowhere near meeting Google's high standards.

Let me be the first (?), before there's even a Wikipedia entry, to announce that my kid is obsessed with the new PBS show Super Why. Odd title, good show. Seems like she falls perfectly into their demographic; she's really into both superheroes and letters of the alphabet. She now pretends all of her animals are the main characters: Super Why, Alpha Pig, Wonder Red, and Princess Presto. She herself pretends to be Super Why. (Sample quotation: "Do you know who you're walking down the stairs/having breakfast/taking a bath with?" "No, who?" "Super Why!") She's only seen three episodes, yet she knows everything about everything Super Why. It boggles the mind. 

I'm a lousy blogger. It's because I am also a merciless self-editor.

I've rewritten the short sentences you see above two or three times already. And then I rewrote that one. And I'm still not happy with them. Seriously. All the posts I have done here so far were composed in my head for weeks beforehand. Then I wrote, rewrote, edited, read aloud, rewrote, posted, edited, posted again, etc., until I had stripped them of all spontaneity. I just looked up how to spell spontaneity. I don't think this is what blogging is all about.

I used to be a spontaneous, adventurous writer. Before the inter-web, I published stapled-and-photocopied zines, full of first-person, first-draft rants. Then I got a job writing for a newspaper, where I'm pretty sure they kept me around as a youthful mascot and not because of any talent. They made me food editor, and I didn't know anything about food. I did know how to use lots of adjectives, though, and how to make most foods sound really disgusting.

As time wore on, I found it easier to make money as an editor and proofreader than as a writer. And that was my downfall. I can't read anymore without simultaneously proofreading. I retain maybe 2% of what I read. I still read constantly, especially on my commute, but I might as well be doing those idiotic word-searches I see people doing on the trains. It's no more edifying. Now I'm not so sure I'm using the word "edifying" correctly.

See, I'm trying to make this more a stream-of-consciousness-style blog post, but it's not going well. And it's total bullshit, because I've been thinking about this subject for weeks.

Other topics I may soon be posting about in a less than spontaneous fashion:

• My wife has something called hyperemesis gravidarum. It's a complication from pregnancy that makes her throw up 10 times a day - way worse than typical morning sickness. She's lost 10 pounds. Oh, and also my wife is pregnant.
• My three-year-old is a fucking genius. (AKA kids say the darndest things.)
• My old band has a new album coming out.
• What the fuck am I doing with my life?

Normally I'd try to wrap this thing up with some kind of kicker, but that would require planning, which I'm not going to do any

I've been looking for a reason to write about this, and now I have one. Up until a few years ago, I had a sensitive stomach. Well into my teens, I would occasionally puke for no apparent reason, and diarrhea was commonplace. I began drinking coffee in my 20s and soon fell into this pattern:

1. Brew a pot of coffee in the morning.
2. Take a few sips, and feel immediate, possibly psychosomatic laxative effects.
3. Rush to bathroom and dispense of mostly liquid waste.
4. Drink more coffee.
5. Repeat trip to bathroom until guts are empty.

After this grotesque routine, I would eat a light breakfast and go about my day. But I had to be really careful at lunchtime—avoiding foods with too much cheese or grease, because they would send me back to the toilet with explosive diarrhea within 30 minutes. This happened 3-5 days a week, usually.

I figured it was normal. That maybe I had IBS or something, and I just had to watch what I ate. I was also convinced that unless I had coffee in the morning, I wouldn't be able to take a crap. This didn't strike me as strange at the time,  and on the occasions when I was forced to skip coffee, I would indeed feel constipated.

Incidentally, during this time I was also a lousy sleeper. It would take me hours to fall asleep, and if something woke me in the night, I'd usually stay awake until dawn.

About three years ago, I contracted a stomach virus. This was totally different from the daily stomach sensitivity; this put me in bed for three days, with audible violence swirling in my intestines the whole time.

While I was sick, very few foods interested me, least of all coffee, and when I got back on my feet, I was no longer addicted to the stuff. So I figured I'd do a little experiment: I switched to decaf in the morning.

The effects were enormous and instantaneous. No more multiple trips to the bathroom. No more liquid poop. No more lactose intolerance. I was completely cured.

For 10+ years, my body was telling me to stop drinking caffeinated coffee on an empty stomach every morning, and I failed to listen. But now I crap like clockwork and can eat anything I want, any time of the day, with no ill effect.

I know decaf still has a little caffeine. And some brands (like the cheap stuff at work) still mess me up a little. But by making this simple switch—and even allowing a caffeinated diet soda in the afternoon—I cured both my IBS and my insomnia. I'm a great sleeper now, too.

So, caffeine was my Kryptonite, and I poisoned myself with it for over a decade. What's yours?

Last night, my daughter insisted I read "Where the Wild Things Are" with an Australian accent, or as she put it, "like Greg" (Wiggle). My Australian accent is modeled after Steve Irwin's, and I can only do it if I bug my eyes and wave my arms and pretend I'm talking about cobras. If I'm lucky I sound like Captain Feathersword might had he divided his childhood equally between Australia, Ireland, and Indiana.

"Last NOIGHT, Max made MEES-chif of WUN kaind orrr unothah..."

"The Story About Ping," the "beloved" children's book from 1933, mysteriously appeared in our house one day. It had a New York Public Library stamp on it, so we figured it might have been my mother's or father's. Our daughter asked us to read it over and over again, probably because she was trying to understand what the hell was going on.

Here is a plot summary:

Ping, a duckling on the Yangtze River, runs away from his family because he doesn't want his "master" to beat him with a stick for being late.

Ping encounters some fishing birds with metal bands clamped tightly around their throats to prevent them from swallowing. The fishing birds give their catch to their "master," who rewards them with tiny morsels that fit through the bands.

Next Ping finds some rice cakes to eat, only to be violently abducted by a bucktoothed, skinheaded Chinese boy whose father wants to cook Ping for dinner. Ping spends the night under a basket, but the boy, in the book's sole act of kindness, releases him.

Ping finds his family and accepts his beating.

After a few hundred times reading this fascist crap, censoring as we went along, Ping has gone bye-bye. There are dozens of reader reviews on Amazon lauding and indicting the book. The least interesting is a "funny" Slashdot-y post that reviews it as a technical manual. Get it? Ping? Ha.

Happy Belated Earth Day.

Last fall, after living and dutifully recycling in Alexandria for more than a year, I finally got around to visiting the city website to see what is actually recyclable. Lo and behold, I'd been breaking the rules: No lids, no jars, no plastic tubs, no pizza boxes, etc. Armed with this knowledge, I became a recycling Nazi, scolding my wife for failing to remove the caps on soda bottles, and getting all kinds of crud under my nails picking through trash every Sunday night to ensure everything is sorted properly.

Since then, just as our three-year-old daughter has learned to obsessively count floor tiles in the bathroom (and I wouldn't stoop to that cliche if it weren't true), I have been obsessively examining other people's trash. More specifically, I look in every recycling bin on my half-mile walk to Metro. And no one—NO ONE—follows the rules.

Robbie must be sobbing himself to sleep at night.

I'm certain that any program that requires Americans to possess both strong organizational skills and a willingness to dig through trash is doomed to fail. Most of us can't organize our sock drawers, let alone a lifetime of waste. My condo unit won't allow pet goats (bastards), so I'm converting my guest room into a biodigester.  

When I was five my parents got a call from a concerned neighbor: "Did you know your son is going door-to-door offering puppet shows for 25 cents?" she asked.

That was one of my first "Hey, look at me!" moments.

In adolescence, I took up juggling, which insured virginity for years. I got really good and performed at parties and mall openings and such. Again, it was "Hey, look at me!"

In college, I ditched the juggling clubs for a bass guitar and took the stage in a number of angry-sounding punk bands. That "Hey, look at me!" phase lasted for more than 10 years, as I cavorted the country in cramped vans playing foul-smelling bars.

Also in college I published "zines"—handmade pamphlets that I wrote, photocopied and stapled, often illegally, at Kinkos. If blogs had existed I would have done that instead. ("Hey, look at me!")

When I lived in New York, I started an online literary* magazine with some friends. Lots of folks contributed, but I kept it running and often wrote something for it five days a week. ("Hey, look at me!")

Then something happened: Real life intervened. I got married, got a real** job, and had a kid. I tried to keep my edge. I started a few blogs. But all of them failed for lack of material. I was concerned that my posts would get me fired or embarrass my wife. And I didn't feel like I had much to say, anyway.

Now, with this blog, I'm posting only when I feel like it, and refusing to feel guilty when weeks or months pass between postings. I am aware of only two readers: my brother and best friend. And that's just fine. Whether it's because I've grown up, sold out, or both, I no longer care if you are looking at me.***

*Literary = smutty and half-assed
**Real = paying
***But feel free to post lengthy testimonies to my greatness