Entries from February 2008 ↓

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald’s, not the least of which being I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don’t stop for about three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can get without qualifying for a legal “disorder.”

I ordered a Chicken McNugget Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. Now there are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a Four-McNugget meal or a Six-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Mister Headgear, I said, “Yes I’d like a Four-McNugget Happy Meal, please.” You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

“Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals,” responds Mister Headgear.

Okay, I’m sorry, Mister Headgear. I know you’re stupid. But I also know that the corporation employing you understands that you’re stupid and has broken down everything you must know into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size… I simply can’t imagine that I am the first person ever to come in here and verbalize this particular order. I know that you know you have a four-McNugget meal, so… why, Mister Headgear-wearing McDonald’s employee, wouldn’t you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin’ Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE STINKIN’ KID!

Now please go ask your slightly smarter manager to give me a refund while I continue farting in your general direction.

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces me to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-olds in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, it’s suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU HAVE!“

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality comes from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain that scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but I will not let that little jerk, Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my inner three-year-old is going to notice.

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants and jimmy them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough). After that, you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. That’s when the real fun would begin.

You’d start by collecting another twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d go out and find a huge freakin’ SPIDER. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface and attacking him from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It’s just a question of how many ants the spider takes with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more messed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would reign victorious. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murderer has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that simple joy with my kids?

(from 2002)

When the pastor asked if I promised to love, honor and support Lauren, I said, “Sure I do.” How hard is that really? Say, “I love you,” treat her well and lend a hand around the house wherever I can. I apparently forgot to consider the fact that my bride-to-be was entering grad school to become a midwife.

I suppose I should have seen the red flags. After undergrad, Lauren took a year off to work as a nurse. Boy did that put things in perspective. I’d be complaining after a bad day, “Geez, my boss was yelling at me, the printer kept jamming and my computer crashed.” She’d come back with, “Oh yeah, well somebody died.” And that would pretty much be the end of that.

I’ve heard that nurses are the worst hypochondriacs because of what they see on a daily basis. Yeah, I get that. Through Lauren, I’ve learned about pretty much every horrible thing that can happen to a person. I was surprised at just how many orifices one can bleed from. And I knew I was gushing from every single one of them. Acute pain was the worst. I felt every poke, prod and incision that Lauren described – usually in my back or stomach. In marriage counseling, they told us listening was important. They didn’t clarify the importance of doubling over in agony.

But I made it through. We made it through. We made it through her night shifts and her sleep deprivation. We made an agreement that for every gruesome story she told me and for every surgical show on the Learning Channel she made me watch, she in turn would have to watch a scary movie. She hates action and suspense as much as I hate sharp stabbing pain, so it was a nice trade off.

Now’s she’s in grad school for midwifery. At first I was jazzed up about the idea. I mean, she’s studying all the precepts of gynecology after all. And so is everybody else in her class! All girls! Sooner or later, I knew they were going to have to practice breast exams! And maybe they’d need extra practice after class! And they’d all come over to our place, and they’d all be naked, and they’d start to tickle each other, and then the pizza girl would show up with her twin sister, and then… and then… And then Lauren told me all about the fine art of performing speculum exams.

Yep. All the women know exactly what I’m talking about. And all the men are better off in the ignorant bliss I was in less than a week ago.

During her year as a nurse, Lauren only had stories. Now she has books. With pictures. Of very not nice things. As I sit writing this, she’s at her desk writing a paper about Gonorrhea. She keeps asking me to touch… places on her body. You know, just to show me how they feel during a clinical exam. Places that should never ever EVER be clinical between a husband and a wife. She recently brought home a video of not one, not two, but six births. And she made me watch every single one of them. Sure sure, I know it’s supposed to be a beautiful, miraculous event. Blah blah blah. It was like a tragic car accident. I was horrified, yet I couldn’t look away. I just lay on my side, curled into as tight a ball as I’ve ever been since… well since I was the potential subject of one of these videos.

But through it all, Lauren was right next to me. Hugging me, cradling me, kissing my temple. She kept telling me how much this meant to her and how much she loved me. She even promised to watch Lord of the Rings as a thank you. How could I not love, honor and support someone like that? It’s a no-brainer.

Lauren’s Masters program lasts eighteen months. She’s two weeks in. Every day I come home and ask her how her day was, even though I probably don’t want to know. But as she starts telling me all about babies and the birthing process and the miracle of life, I can’t help but feel the excitement in her eyes and the passion in her voice. Passion about something that is more than just a career. It’s a calling. So I just smile, remembering why I fell in love with her, and why I said, “I do.”

Then she asks me to come feel her cervix – and the scalpels pierce my stomach yet again.