Northbound

A new piece, by me, at McSweeney’s.

Thanks to the good people at the New York Times for inspiring the piece, and of course to the grand master himself. 

How it happened:  I was at home on a weekday afternoon, looking after a sick baby.  She finally fell asleep in the bouncy chair, and I was making myself some sort of sandwich in the kitchen of the old mini-mansion, thinking about what magical fictional realm I could plunder.  Vogon?  Too nasty.  Bedrock?  Too kitschy.  Middle-Earth?  Too geeky.  Grand Prairie?  Too close to home. 

And then it hit me, and I smiled the smile of the joyous and fulfilled, and it took me maybe an hour to do.

MoDo:

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted.

And if he had said something else, he would have been right a third time!  And a fourth!  Because President Obama is always right.  By the end of Obama’s second term, I expect all MoDo columns to be just long strings of “two legs bad, four legs good.”

I think back, occasionally, of when I was single and living alone in Atlanta, and could do anything I want on the weekends, so long as I had clean underwear to wear to work on Monday.  I am not necessarily indulging in nostalgia when I do this – I can’t, and shouldn’t, because I was lonely and unhappy and broke for a good part of this time.  But on any given fall weekend, you could find me doing any of a variety of pleasant things:

• Sleeping late
• Checking e-mail
• Working on novel
• Long, hot bath
• Schlepping to Publix to pick up breakfast-type substance (chocolate milk, donuts, maybe Crunchberries, stuff like that).
• Walking in Piedmont Park
• Playing video games
• Getting Mexican food at Nuevo Laredo Cantina, with the UGa game on in the background
• Doing a little shopping at the junky little design stores over north of Georgia Tech
• Catching a movie at the little theater in Midtown
• Writing a movie review of whatever movie it was that I saw
• Grabbing an F.O. at the Varsity or maybe a Krispy Kreme over on Ponce or a butterscotch shake at Zesto’s

There’s a lot you can say about living your life this way – wasteful, high-calorie, lazier than Adam’s off ox – but what it was, you see, was self-directed.  I decided what to do.  Nobody else told me what to do, ever, period.  I got to choose what to do – and maybe just as importantly, I got to choose what order I could do them in.  If I wanted to get up early and grab donuts and then haze out in front of the TV to the Falcons game all the rest of the day, I could do it – with whatever snack and donut breaks that I wanted.  If I wanted to sleep late and write and not stir out of my apartment until three in the afternoon, I could do that, too.  I decided what to do and when to do it.

I mention this because it occurs to me that a lot of the trouble that I have in relating to my daughters is that they have absolutely zero freedom at all to do anything.  Being a four-month-old baby is like watching a giant TV but having someone else change the channels for you randomly – somebody with a good idea of what you like, but no clue of what you want to see right now.  Storytime with Daddy?  That’s a good show, very popular, but not everybody wants to see it when it’s on.  Let’s Ride in the Minivan?  Usually a hit, but sometimes it’s too short, and sometimes it drags on.  What about Does The Baby Have A Fever?  Oh, not so popular. 

The only mechanism that the baby has to change the channel (so to speak) is crying; even the threat of crying is enough to cause the program directors (that’s Mommy and Daddy) to produce a new show.  Is Tummy Time not testing well?  Okay then.  Time to switch to Monkey!  Monkey!  Monkey!  That’s usually a big hit… no?  How about the interactive version, where the baby gets to hold the monkey (it’s a rattle, shaped like a monkey)?  No?  Okay, how about Riding on Daddy’s Shoulder.  That’s a great show – that’s like The Sopranos when you’re four months old.  If that doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t at first… then what?

Here’s the thing.  I want to do good here.  I want to be a good program manager.  But I have no – zero – idea what to do at any given moment.  I can try the monkey-rattle.  I can try the swing.  I can try the diaper change.  I can try the bottle.  But I don’t know what’s going to be popular at any one given moment in time.  And that problem doubles when you’re trying to figure out two babies at once – one may want to spend some quiet time watching Let’s Look at the Ceiling Fan while the other one is interested in Pick Me Up Or Else.  It’s difficult.  Throw in short attention spans – you can’t really count on Monkey!  Monkey!  Monkey!  to distract them for very long anymore – and it’s impossible.  (Not to mention that they are starting to create new shows of their own – last night saw the premiere of I’m Keeping This Pacifier In My Mouth For Three Seconds and That’s It.)

And that means they’re going to cry.  A lot.  And it’s going to be really, really loud.

I am still not a fan of the Blessed Redeemer, but if he’s still willing to push the button on Predator strikes that take out terrorists named bin Laden, I think a lot more of him now than I did during the campaign.  Let’s have more stories like this.

UPDATE:  Heh.

The WSJ engages in some statistical sophistry:

For-profit schools also generally do a better job. In Ohio, Columbus State Community College has a 6% graduation rate while Kaplan College Columbus graduates 51%. In New Jersey, Passaic Community College has a 6% graduation rate, while at the nearby for-profit Berkeley College in West Paterson 40% of the students graduate.

I mean, I don’t know what it was like where you went to school, but where I went to school, it was common for Baylor students to avoid tough-grading professors by concurrently enrolling in McLennan Community College, taking the course there, and transferring it back to Baylor for credit.   And none of those people ever “graduated” from MCC, but they would have counted against the school in determining the graduation rate.  There are lots of metrics you can look at to determine whether community colleges are doing a good job or not; I don’t think that the graduation rate is one of them.

I don’t think the Blessed Redeemer knows squat about country music, but he couldn’t have picked much better ambassadors than Alison Krauss, Brad Paisley and Charley Pride.  Sa-lute.

June is over, and good riddance to it.  Lots of nasty rain.  Let’s jump in to July.

Deferred from last month:

• Finish laying grout in the mosaic piece, clean it up, put a wire on the back, nail up the brackets, and hang it in the master bathroom (FAIL, when it was done, it just didn’t look good enough – going to get some more tile and try again).
• Produce new baby video (accomplished).
• Get high chairs put together (accomplished)
• Query letters (eight letters out, one rejection so far)
• Enter McSweeney’s contest (accomplished).

New for this month:

• Call Toyota dealer and check to see when title will be coming in (accomplished).
• Put up tennis-ball thingy to mark where you need to pull the minivan in to get it to work (accomplished).
• Get garage door opener reprogrammed for wife’s car (accomplished to the degree that it can be accomplished)
• Decide logistics for Texas trip in August (accomplished) and call travel agent (accomplished).
• Get satellite radio hook-up for new minivan (deferred).
• Get satellite radio hook-up for family room (accomplished).
• Schlep to IKEA for furniture for family room (bookcases and media center and suchlike) (deferred).
• Schlep to post office to pick up title for new minivan (accomplished).
• Pay remainder of medical bills (accomplished).
• Bug home theater guys about the delay in switching channels (accomplished).
• Go through will and living will paperwork (mostly done) and make appointment with lawyer to get it signed.
• Send punch list to builder on nail pops, etc. (accomplished).
• Find cheap iPod for upstairs alarm clock (accomplished).
• Schlep to Costco for formula (accomplished).
• Scan and send in receipts for FSA card (accomplished).
• Return extra satellite antenna to Amazon (accomplished).
• Fertilize lawn (accomplished).
• Paint areas on smoker where paint needed to be cleared away (accomplished).
• Schlep to Michael’s to get GWB and RR photos and documents framed (accomplished).

Note to Hugo Chavez:  If you’ve lost the enthusiastic support of NPR on your land reform issue, you’ve lost way more than you think.

Oh, this is rich (not Frank Rich, but Thomas Frank in the WSJ).

To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman’s voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger’s sneer, every celebrity’s slight, every crazy Internet rumor.

Oh, please.   You show me anybody on the left who takes hostility in stride.  These are the people who said that making note of the Blessed Redeemer’s middle name was a hate crime.  These are the people who thought that the idjits who told HRC to iron their shirts were thought criminals.  Having anyone on the left accuse anyone on the right of being thin-skinned is like being called ugly by a bullfrog.

You want to know who is thick-skinned?  GWB.

“Oh, I could have made law review, if I really wanted to, but come on.  It’s so much extra work, and the people who made law review were so stuck-up anyway, I didn’t see the point.  Besides, I think the journal I was on helped me so much more in my career.”
 
“I have this child that I sponsor.  His name’s Pablo, lives in the Ozarks.  His parents are migrant workers, they both have hepatitis E, you know, the really strong strain.  They spend all day picking sugar cane, it’s a really rough life.  He has this dream of having his own podcast one day, to tell people about growing up poor and Bolivian in Arkansas, and my heart just goes out to him, you know?”
 
“I don’t even like talking about my grandfather.  The way I see it, he never talked to us about hitting the beaches at Normandy, or crossing the bridge at Remagen, or liberating those three concentration camps, or the two Silver Stars, so why should I bring it up all the time?  I mean, just because they named that school after him and all.”
 
“Yeah, I nailed her.  Seriously.  Back in college, when she was just starting out her modeling career.  Before she moved to California and got that part on The Hills.  And it wasn’t a one-night stand or anything, we hooked up like seven or eight times before I broke up with her.”
 
“The summer after my junior year, I volunteered to teach literacy at the Choctaw reservation in Arizona.  It was a great experience, really opened my eyes about social justice.  They even gave me a tribal name in this great ceremony.  It was Hekawi-na-Sedona, which in their language means ‘Hater of Adverbs.’”
 
“No, I do have that extra laptop in my closet, but it’s not going to do Pablo any good, since his cabin doesn’t have electricity.  It would be like mocking him or something, wouldn’t it?  Giving him technology he can’t use?”
 
“I had no idea prostitution was legal in Germany.  It makes all the difference in the world, too, in terms of quality, of course, but also in the level of service.  I mean, you want two petite redheads with D-cups and experience using soft restraints in this country, it’s a special order, take you a week or so to get it booked, but in Germany, hey, no questions asked.”
 
“Hmmm, yeah, I definitely taste the fruitiness, it’s kind of like a ’67 Bordeaux in that respect.  And there’s something else, an undertone, maybe sandalwood.  But there’s a creaminess and a bitterness behind it, really intense, like a really good cappuccino, you think?”
 
“Well, like everybody else, I watch the occasional American Idol episode.  But it’s not like I watch every episode or vote every week or anything like that.  I don’t get obsessed with reality TV shows; it’s not like I’m some loser who watches reruns of that MTV dating show over and over again or anything.  You know, with what’s her name.  Tila Mojito or whoever.”
 
“No, I checked, the one-laptop-per-child thing isn’t an option for Pablo.  I mean, it might work, but they don’t have wireless access in the Ozarks, so it’s not really an option.  But thanks for bringing it up.”
 
“No, it’s not true.  Think about it.  It’s my sister’s wedding, for God’s sake.  I’m not going to risk my relationship with her by banging one of her bridesmaids in the handicapped stall, okay?  Besides, it’s not like I could even get her out of that dress anyway.  Give me a little credit.”
 
“I knew the Patriots were going to suck last year.  I thought so even before training camp.  I mean, look at their secondary.  I said it was going to be Arizona and Pittsburgh, and nobody believed me.”
 
“Oh, I definitely agree.  I’ve always thought that Derrida was right about the destruction of the phallocracy paving the way for the rise of nihilism.”
 
“Sweetie, it’s just a little short fictional piece.  Really.  Purely creative license.  No, it’s not… I’ve never even been to Germany, really, you can check my passport.”