Fun and Games (in moderation)

Approximate retail value of the mass of little Korak’s toys in our living-dining room (that is, not counting in Korak’s bedroom, the backseats of our cars, etc.): $300,000.00.

Thing that held Korak’s attention the longest last night: stacking and unstacking red Solo cups on the dining room table.

I know, I KNOW, “Kid gets a shiny new toy … and ends up playing with the cardboard box it came in!” is something a stand-up wannabe would say at open mic night. In South Dakota. Somehow this does not make it any less bemusing when my boy embodies it.

Korak, unsurprisingly, wanted bananas (his new favorite food) for dinner last night. He knows where we keep them and he’ll point in that direction and babble and grunt until someone tall enough to reach them gets the idea. He would have happily gorged on an entire good-sized banana but I was hoping to give him a little more variety, so I distracted him long enough to put some peach yogurt bites and some cheese and some bread in front of him. I was feeling pretty good as he went to town on those, and then I realized those are all “beige foods” and not as varied as they could be. Luckily I managed to add some avocado to the mix before he got full, and thus keep my points total for Father Of The Year well above the cutoff line.

Speaking of points totals …

So the New York Football Giants won on Sunday (woohoo!) but last night was really my first chance to take stock of the dark and obsessive side of football season: fantasy football and pick’em pools. Things on that front are … not going well.


I’m in a fantasy football league with 13 other guys which means there isn’t a ton of depth at any position. The biggest name on my roster is Terrell Owens. I hate Terrell Owens and I never would have drafted him but I had to miss the draft in August so one of my buddies drafted for me and he took T.O. when it came around to my turn and that was the best projected value on the board. And I appreciate him doing me that solid. (He also drafted me the Giants’ defense/special teams because he knows they’re my boys.) But at this point I’m torn between trying to trade T.O., outright dumping him onto waivers, or just benching him all season so that no one else can take advantage of any flashes of brilliance he might have in Buffalo. None of which he had on Monday night, of course. I finished the weekend with a team score of 67.5 points, which was the fourth lowest score of the week. And it was touch and go there to not be Dead Fucking Last. I’ve been doing fantasy football for five or six years now and it doesn’t surprise me to be where I am. I’m pretty bad at it, but the season would be weirdly empty without it.

I’m also in a pick’em pool for the first time, as is Korak’s mom Jane. (Not Korak, though, tempting as it might be to let him make his own picks.) (You guys get that I’m doing a Tarzan theme here, right? So really it’s Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fault that my wife has to be “Jane” instead of something more intriguing. Like “Fanci”.) The pool is run by an old high school friend of my dad’s and a lot of my family is in it, including Very Little Bro and my 85 year old grandmother. My grandma who is now tied for first place after one week – she went 12 and 3! Jane went 9 and 6 and I went 7 and 8. There are 39 people in the pool and 11 of them did worse than I did. Not great (kind of like the Black Plague survival rate was “not great”) but I called a couple of upsets correctly, so that amuses me, and some of the ones I got wrong were literally only one point off against the spread, so my luck may change over the next sixteen weeks.

The fact is I am not very good at these games! So I would not expect too many victorious announcements here at Parenthetical Central. But I assume that hilarious stories about how hapless I am in both competitions is going to play better to the crowd in the long run anyway.