First a Dog, Now a Baby: My Poop-Filled Life

January 7, 2012 by

I used to have a poop-free life.  Not completely poop-free, of course. I had to deal with my own poop.  Not a whole lot of fun there.  But at least it was only mine. One person’s pool.  Ahh, the good old days.

Then I got a dog, and that was the end of the poop-free life. I had to deal with poop pretty much every day. On a good day, it was a good poop: a poop on the grass, during our daily walks, while I was armed with a baggie. Or a poop on the wee-wee pad in my bathroom, which has become Kozy the Dog’s designated “inside poop zone.”  On a bad day, though, a bad poop: a poop, say, on the living room rug.  But good or bad, there was poop.  Every day.

Now I have a baby, and my life is nothing but poop. Bad poop. People warned me, but I never quite appreciated how babies are basically poop machines.  They’re amazing, these little tiny beautiful creatures, constantly pumping out an astounding flow of truly ghastly poop.

How do they do that? What kind of unholy alchemy is this? This transubstantiation of liquid into solid, or at least something that is partly solid.  You put in a little bit of harmless-looking formula, and you get back a noxious miasma of inhuman sludge.

People ask me what’s the biggest change now that I’ve moved to the suburbs.  That.  That’s the biggest change.

  • City = Poop Free
  • Suburbs = Poop Filled

Now, I know that I can’t blame it on the suburbs.  It’s really more correlation than causation.  I know that. But of the many things that I miss about living in the city, right at the top of what is a pretty long list is this: the loss of my poop-free life.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Advice for People Adopting a Baby: How NOT to Prepare for Your Home Study Interview

December 1, 2011 by

Now that we’re back in the states with our little boy, I can tell this story about the adoption process that I embargoed for reasons I’ll explain at the end.

So when you’re adopting a kid, you have to go through a whole screening process. They do criminal checks, take fingerprints, stuff like that. Makes sense, right?  Also, you have to complete a home study interview, where a social worker comes to your home for like three hours to ask you a bunch of questions about your childhood, your parenting philosophy, whether you’re ready to have a child, etc.

It’s not really an “interview” like a job interview. You already have the “referral” and are pretty far through the adoption process, so it’s really more like a final “red flag” check where the social worker just wants to make sure that you’re not living in filth, that you’re not raising baby-eating snakes, that you don’t have naked pictures of little boys adorning your walls, stuff like that. My guess is that the bar is pretty low — the social worker just wants to make sure that nothing jumps out that indicates that you’d put a child at risk.

I felt pretty confident.  We have a nice home, we’re nice people, we showed a commitment to raising a family by leaving the decadent urban Sodom and Gomorrah to come to the land of picket fences and play groups.  We’re model parents!

Of course, my wife is crazy.  So she treated the interview like it was a “make or break” moment for our adoption, as if we had to be absolutely PERFECT or they might take our baby away.  She was running around the house all week cleaning up and straightening out, basically scouring our condo to eliminate any potential sign that we’d be unsuitable parents.  Kozy the dog?  Groomed and cleaned.  Joe the husband?  Get a haircut!  Dying plant in the hallway?  Out you go!  No way we’re going to let the interviewer think that we can’t take care of a plant, or she might nix the adoption.  She was impossible to live with.

Later that week, we’re sitting down with this very nice woman answering some very predictable questions about us and our personal histories.  Essentially, you really only need to make a simple impression: I have no intention of beating my child.  Other than that, you pretty much can’t go wrong.

So what happens?  We get this question: what is your worst memory as a child? I go first, and I describe how I fell from a tree when I was about eight while I was picking apples with my father, and about how worried and upset he was. I thought it was a pretty good story, all about how much my father cared about me, worried about me, took good care of me, just like — hint! — I’ll take good care of this kid that you’re letting me adopt.

And then my wife starts answering the question, telling us about how her worst memory is about how she was fighting with her sister, and accidentally broke a closet door.  So far so good.  Then she explains how the bad part of the memory is that her mother spanked her.  Ummm, okay, but let’s try to stay away from that whole spanking thing, huh?  And THEN she goes on to say that, well, because she’d been so bad and disobeyed her mother, she probably DESERVED IT.

RED FLAG!  RED FLAG! RED FLAG!

Okay, it wasn’t that bad.  The social worker barely noticed.  It’s just that I was hyper-sensitive after watching my wife make our home a dying-plant-free-zone, telling me how important it was to make the right impression, now expressing the rather unorthodox opinion that you can’t blame parents who spank their kids because, you know, sometimes you JUST HAVE TO SMACK THAT KID AROUND A LITTLE TO KEEP HIM IN LINE!  It was hilarious. My guess is that if it was okay to say that, we probably could have kept the poor plants.

So my lesson for people adopting a child is simple: don’t do that.

P.S. My wife wouldn’t let me tell that story for the past four months until we were safely back in the states with our boy.  To the extent that someone in authority reads this blog, let me state very clearly that we would never, ever, under any circumstances hit a child. So please don’t take my kid away.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Participating in “Movember” Shows Me Why It’s a Really Bad Idea for Me to Grow a Mustache

November 30, 2011 by

 

 

 

 

 

I really hate cancer.  You probably do too.  So I was delighted to take part in the annual Movember fundraiser to fight prostate cancer, which promotes the cause by encouraging people to grow mustaches (hence, “MO-Vember”) to raise awareness and visibility and all that.

I have not been as involved this year, because most of November involved going to Taiwan to pick up the kid, and I didn’t want to show up there sporting a scary mustache.  I figure he should probably get to know me as I usually look.

So I got started on my mustache late, only around Thansgiving, and I have to say that it doesn’t…..well, it doesn’t look………good.  Some people look great in mustaches, like Keith Hernandez.  Other people, like me, look like someone who drives around in a white, windowless van.

Take a look, if you dare.  And if you want to contribute, go to this link.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

The Year of the Plagues: Snow on Halloween

November 2, 2011 by

Seriously?  It snowed on Halloween?  Two months ago, we got an earthquake, and then a hurricane, and now everyone’s costume parties got canceled because we got snow in October?  This is really a wierd year.

I’m dreading winter.  The one thing I hate about living in New York is the climate.  And I’ve lived in this climate pretty much my whole life, except for two wonderful years in northern California when I was at Stanford.  People who complain about the weather in San Francisco should just be beaten around the head and face, because it’s just the best.  Never too hot, never too cold, you can pretty much wear a light jacket all year round.  A little fog once in a while? Please.  Shut up.

I hate the climate in the northeast.  People that say they love living where they can enjoy all four seasons are talking about like five days every season. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, you get like five good days of spring between the rain and then the heat, and maybe 20 good days to look at the leaves in the fall.  Otherwise, horrible. Give me one season — Sunny — and I’m fine.

I’m off to go shovel some snow in my vampire costume.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, What Else Do You Got?

September 3, 2011 by

My parking garage after the hurricane.

An unmoored boat, not mine for once, beached on the rocks by the Nyack pier.

 

First an earthquake, and now a hurricane.  Been an interesting August.

We rode out the hurricane okay.  I know we weren’t supposed to leave our home and all, but a friend was having a birthday party Saturday, and, well, the hurricane wasn’t expected to really arrive until later that night, so we went.  I mean, after writing a few weeks ago about how tough New Yorkers are, I couldn’t very well blow off a party for a little wind and rain.

I was certainly glad to be out of the city for something like this, though.  That was a little scary, some of the warnings that were being made. I’m thinking that in a natural disaster, you pretty much want to be in a place where you aren’t in a big tall building surrounded by other big tall buildings, and where you have a car that you can use to escape if the disaster turns into the apocalypse.

That said, I don’t have the classic suburban home. I’m up in a condo at the top of a tall building, poised to fall right into the Hudson should anything really bad happen.  Even better, pretty much all my walls are made of glass.  The glass is much better for checking out the river views, but much, much worse for your state of mind when they’re getting rocked by 75 mph winds.  You know what it sounds like when a hurricane hits a wall of glass, 200 feet above the ground?  I do.  Not good.  Not good at all.

But we made it through. No real damage, a little flooding in our garage but we were able to move the cars to higher ground.  The worst part was climbing stairs again, a reminder from my old days in my Manhattan walkup.  No way I was taking an elevator with the risk of the power going out (it eventually did for a day or so), making me one of those light-hearted news features about the schmuck who spent three days trapped drinking his own urine to survive.  So the stairs it is!

Hope everyone is okay.  Keep a watch out for the locusts.  And if you’re a first-born son like me, you might want to keep an eye on your front door. 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs

Thoughts on Yesterday’s Earthquake, and Why New Yorkers are Tougher Than Everyone Else

August 23, 2011 by

I don’t know about you, but I felt the earth move.  Har!

How about that? An earthquake.  In New York. That’s something new for all of us.

Now, I have another reason to be glad that I moved to the suburbs — namely, if we’re going to start having earthquakes in a big, dense city made up of buildings that were never built to withstand earthquakes, then I certainly feel that I made a pretty good trade.  Being able to get good ethnic food is wonderful and all, but not when the walls start trembling.

That said, I’m not particularly safe here in my condo in Nyack, on the eight floor of a building that I’m pretty sure what constructed on landfall.  A couple of good shakes, and I’ll be sleeping with the fishies.  That’s why I was a little freaked out yesterday, and encouraged my wife to get the heck out of the condo and take a walk or something.  I don’t even know that my insurance coverage protects me from earthquakes.  Probably something I should check.

It’s really monstrously unfair to subject New Yorkers to earthquakes, on top of everything else that they (sadly, that used to be “we”) have to deal with. I’ve always thought that New Yorkers are simply tougher than everyone else, by the sheer necessity of dealing with all the daily outrages and irritations that you have to put up with when you live in crowded, noisy city.

New Yorkers just deal.  Summers are too hot.  Winters are too cold.  You take a cab, you sit in traffic, you take the subway, you stand packed together next to someone who could easily be a serial killer. You live in a jail cell. Crazy people everywhere. Everyone in a rush, bumping into each other.  Snow, hail, sleet, hurricanes, blackouts — we get it all, and we just keep going to work.  Assholes dropped two fucking PLANES on our city, and we were all back at our desks two days later.  We DEAL.

No one else has to deal with all that stuff.  People who live in LA, for example, are like veal, sensitive and temperamental.  It’s so beautiful every day, they get freaked out with any change in their routine.  I’ve been in LA on rainy days, it’s like everyone’s afraid to be outside. They can’t drive.

So the fact that people in LA were sneering at our response to the earthquake was a little irritating. Yes, the idea of the buildings gave us a little pause.  Something new and surprising.  So people hurried out of the buildings, and some people got the rest of the day off.  But today?  Back to work.  Like always.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Does Having a Dog Prepare You For Having a Kid?

July 15, 2011 by

I’ve written before how all my parent friends are enjoying themselves right now at the news that we’re going to have a kid. Most of them had kids years ago, and they’re getting a lot of kicks out of the idea of me becoming a father at 44.  “Oh, it’s going to be so hard.”  “What a big change.”  Stuff like that.

So just to mess with them, I keep shrugging it off, telling them that it’s no big deal.  After all, I have a dog.  That’s pretty much the same thing.

Oh, how they hate that.  They start sputtering: “Outrageous!  How can you compare having a dog to having a kid?!?”  Okay, people don’t exclaim “Outrageous!” anymore, but you catch my drift.

And I really am just messing with them.  I don’t think it’s the same thing, but I actually think that having a dog is good preparation for having a kid.  Just hear me out.

  • First, having a dog means that you get used to cleaning up someone’s poop. That’s a big step in a man’s life.  Once you’ve broken the seal on that, a little more poop isn’t going to make a difference.
  • Second, having a dog means that you have to feed something every day if you want to keep it alive. Plants? You can water them once in a while, whenever you remember.  Plants will deal.  You have to remember to feed the dog, just like you’ll have to remember to feed the baby.
  • Third, having a dog means that you’ve already lost your freedom, anyway.  It used to be we could decide to just go away for the weekend, literally at the last minute. Those days are done.  Can’t leave a dog alone at home for the weekend.

You see my point?  Same thing!  Piece of cake.

Okay, yes, I understand that a baby has a much higher degree of difficulty.  But I do think that any couple thinking of having kids should first think about getting a dog.  At the very least, if you find that you actually can’t keep a dog alive — if, for example, you run off to Atlantic City for the weekend and only remember that you have a dog when you smell his rotting carcass upon your return — then you probably should keep practicing good birth control.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Does Living in the Suburbs Make You Healthier? Maybe for Some People….

June 20, 2011 by

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that suburbanites are actually healthier than people who live in either the city or in rural areas.

For many urban dwellers, the country conjures up images of clean air, fresh food and physical activities. But these days, Americans residing in major cities live longer, healthier lives overall than their country cousins—a reversal from decades past.

***

To be sure, city dwellers live with more air pollution and violent crime. They also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and low-birth-weight babies and are more likely to drink excessively. But overall, urbanites tend to rate their own health more highly and are less likely to die prematurely than rural Americans, according to the county rankings report.

In many measures, residents of suburban areas are the best off. They generally rate their own health the highest and have the fewest premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts. Suburbanites also have the fewest low-birth-weight babies, homicides and sexually transmitted diseases.

The emphasis is mine, gloriously mine!  How about that?  Live in the city, and you’re more likely to drink excessively (very true, in my experience), and you’re less healthy from all the air pollution.

Move to the suburbs, though and you reduce your chances, according to the article,  having low-weight babies, getting murdered, and getting the pox.  That’s a pretty good tradeoff off for lousy Thai food, amirite???

Not that moving the suburbs has helped me at all, frankly.  That is, I have not gotten a sexually transmitted disease or been murdered or had a low-weight baby, so that’s good.  But it’s not like I’m exercising more than I did when I lived in the city, which is to say that I did virtually no exercise back then and I’ve continued that rigorous campaign now in the suburbs.  The only change is that I haven’t joined a gym yet, so my lack of exercising is free, a nice change from the city, where not-exercising at my local Crunch cost me like $75 a month.  I’ve put that $75 savings into more cigarettes and booze.

But just from reading that article, I feel healthier already….

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

My Maiden Voyage: How Captain Idiot Busted Up His Boat, A Dock, and Almost Killed Two People and One Dog

June 18, 2011 by

Captain Idiot

Let me tell you about my first trip on the new boat.

So I get this boat.  It actually belonged to a friend of mine, who is a terrific boater and happens to be a mechanic.  He was selling it, and it made sense to buy (1) from someone I knew and trusted, (2) who was a mechanic, so he probably kept it in really good condition, and (3) from a friend who was willing to help teach me everything I needed to know about it.

And it’s a beautiful boat.  At 28 feet, it’s big enough to hold all the people that will now visit me in the suburbs so they can go on my boat.  It has two motors, which I figured was perfect because I would have a backup motor when I invariably busted a propeller.  And it has a cabin and a real bathroom, so my wife will actually come out with me.

So far so good.  Here’s the problem.  The day he delivered the boat to me, docking it at the condo complex, it was raining. We were supposed to go out so he could show me the ropes on how to drive (errr– pilot) it, but because of the rain we just skipped the lesson and figured we would do it sometime soon, BEFORE I ever took the boat out.

But then a week or so passed, and we couldn’t get our schedules together.  And it was an absolutely beautiful summer Saturday, and I just couldn’t wait any more.  How hard could it be?  You turn on the engine, you point the boat.  Simple.

So here’s what happened.  My wife and I packed a nice picnic lunch, grabbed the dog — because dogs love being out on the open water, right?? — and took down the cover of the boat, started undoing the ropes.  Being the master boater that I am, I remembered to turn on the blower before I started the engines, because otherwise the engine blows up or something.  That turns out to be the only smart thing I did all day.

The engines both start up. All the gauges and stuff by the captain’s chair seem to be working fine.  It’s a beautiful day. What a great moment!  Here I am, ready for my first trip out on my new boat.  I take a deep breath, tell my wife she can release the last rope holding us to the dock, and push the gear shift and throttle forward.

And the boat roars to life, zooms forward, and crashes into the dock across from me.

Okay, I should stop right here and explain something.  I’ve admitted before that I’m not a good boater, but I do have some experience. Unfortunately, my experience was always with boats that had a simple and intuitive engine set up. Namely, they had a “stick shift” that you basically pushed up to go forward and down to go in reverse.  One stick. Push it this way, go straight. Push it that way, go back.  Aim with the wheel.  Just like a car.  Very easy.  Very intuitive.

This boat is different.  Not only does it have two engines, but two DIFFERENT types of sticks.  One stick is the shifter, like the transmission, that you push up to go forward and back to go in reverse.  So far so good.  And then there’s another stick, the throttle, which controls the power — the further you push it, the faster you go.

That’s where it gets a little tricky.  Because, for example, let’s say that you just drove your new boat straight into a dock, and the boat is trying very hard to actually climb up the dock and use it as a ramp to free itself from the surly bonds of earth and fly gloriously into the air and into the waterfront condo 30 feet in front of you.  And let’s also say that your limited experience in boats has taught you the basic lesson that if you want to go in reverse, you just pull back on the stick.  So you do that, and it doesn’t help.  In fact, what happens is that you hear the almost cartoon-like pinging sounds of little pieces of your gears flying apart.

Why? Because in YOUR boat, the gear shift and the throttle are SEPARATE.  So to go in reverse, so that you’re no longer basically half out of the water and beached on this dock, you have to push BACK on the gear shift and FORWARD on the throttle.  Back on one stick, forward on the other.

Instead, what you did, in a blind sphincter-clenching panic with piss dripping down your leg, is instinctively pull back on everything.  Which you’re not supposed to do, because it strips the gears, just like what would happen if you decided to shift your car into reverse when you were going 55 miles an hour down the highway.  And then you’re basically screwed.

Back to our story.  Here I am, about four seconds into my first boat trip, and my boat has crashed into a dock, is halfway up in the air, and is aimed directly at one of my neighbor’s condo.  My wife is screaming at me, the dog is barking, the engines are roaring.  As far as I know, I’ve opened a gaping hole in the bottom of my boat, and we’re minutes away from sinking, all of us drowning about ten feet from shore.  I pull back on the engines, stripping the gears, but at least the engine stops roaring, and basic gravity drops us back into the water.

But now I don’t really have any maneuverability, what with the whole “my gear shift is now a molten pile of metal” thing.  So we start drifting around, desperately using the pilings to push ourselves around, trying to get into one of the slips so we can turn off the boat and I can commence with tying it to a dock, going home, having a drink, and never leaving my house again.

To make things even better, there’s a big crowd of people watching. My dock is right next to a public pier in Nyack, so there are like 30 people who were having a nice day hanging out on the pier and taking in the sights, now getting the treat of watching a dumbass destroy his boat.  The only good thing that happened to me that day was that none of those people were quick enough to pull out their smartphones, so I didn’t end up in a viral Youtube video.

So that was my first trip on the boat.  Four seconds of abject terror, followed by about five minutes of blinding humiliation, followed by an unending series of new and unprecedented bills: a bill to repair the gears, a bill to fix my neighbors dock, a bill for all the alcohol I’m going to need to forget that day.

The best day of my life can’t come soon enough.  Never buy a boat.

P.S.  The picture isn’t actually from that day, but it’s probably a fair representation of what I looked like.  I’m wearing the hat ironically, of course, or at least that’s what I tell people….

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Why Do Parents Want You to Have Kids, Then Laugh at You When You Do?

May 25, 2011 by

Now that we’ve announced we’re going to be having a baby,  friends of ours keep giving us that whole, “oh boy, you don’t know what you’re in for” speech.

Have you ever noticed that?  When you don’t have kids, you can’t escape parents who constantly tell you about all the wonderful things you’re missing.  Picture after picture posted on Facebook, all those Christmas cards of the happy family, the occasional awkward question about whether you’re ever going to have kids.

But once you announce you’re having a kid, the tune changes.  Now, all they want to do is gloat about how miserable you’re going to be.  They laugh and laugh like hyenas — “oh, all that nice furniture you bought for you new condo, THAT’S all over,” “enjoy your nights out while you still can,” stuff like that.  Like the vampire at your window trying to seduce you into going outside, or the the old joke about the devil:

John arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter tells John that he has arrived at a moment where the balance between Heaven and Hell is exactly equal. This event allows him the unique opportunity to take a look around at Heaven AND Hell and decide where he wants to spend eternity.

John takes a little stroll around Heaven … nice puffy clouds…people hanging around playing harps…smiling…peaceful. He thinks that looks pretty nice. Could be a good choice. With that he hops in the elevator down to Hell…

The doors open and the devil shows him into a big room….WOW…. What a party! People dancing, drinking up a storm, singing, laughing, having an amazing time. “Now,” he shouts, “THIS is the way to spend eternity!”

He jumps back on the elevator and runs to tell St. Peter that while Heaven is certainly lovely, Hell is simply an awesome party and that is his choice. John jumps back on the elevator and when the doors open he is shocked to see flames shooting everywhere, people screaming with fear and pain, etc….

John quickly runs to find the Devil and says, “What happened? I was just here and it was a giant party.. how could this be?”

“Simple,” replies The Devil .“Before you were a prospect… now you’re a client!”

Essentially, that’s what happens.  When you don’t have kids, you’re a prospect — all these parents want you to join the team, so they try to make it as appealing as possible. Then once you sign up, they can let it all hang out.  Jackals. Oh, how I hate them.

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,
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