In a way, it’s the little guy’s fault that there was no post yesterday, because it all traces back to the malicious stomach bug he had over the weekend. He really did recover in a day or less, but ah, he’s young. He also managed to pass it to my wife, who evinced her own succumbing on Tuesday with such indisputable evidence that she was sent home from work early. I thought I might have dodged the bullet myself at that point; you can probably imagine the high rpm’s my mind underwent as I made sure my wife had everything she needed to go to bed Tuesday night immediately after we got the little guy down in his crib, and I envisioned having a couple hours to play video games or watch a Netflix movie or something similarly selfishly self-amusing. But I laid down next to my wife as she drifted off, to keep her company, and found myself drifting off as well, until I got up later just to properly get myself ready for bed. On Wednesday my wife bravely faced another day of work, as did I, but by the time I got the little guy home from daycare that evening I felt like I had been run down by a monster truck, and it was my turn to choose to go straight to bed after our son’s bedtime ritual, with my wife joining me directly after she got home from her own long day at the clinic.
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So yesterday was my wife’s day off from work anyway, and I e-mailed in sick, partly as a precaution to make sure I didn’t infect any of my co-workers. Turned out to be the right call, as it happened, because while I never got quite to the can’t-keep-anything-down stage, I rode long, slow waves all day, cresting with “I feel reasonably all right” and troughing out around “ugh achy tired gross must lay down on carpet don’t have energy to stop little guy from riding my head like a rocking horse ugh”.
And it’s not only hard to focus on thinking and typing and blogging when feeling like that, it’s also hard to justify blogging, because the house becomes a disaster. Normally there’s a certain amount of responsible grown-up energy expenditure in following in the wake of the little guy, sometimes encouraging him to clean up after himself, sometimes just picking things up for him mid-strew because it’s not worth the fight, and that of course is on top of things like keeping the household laundry cycling along and cleaning up plates and cookware after meals, and so on. But this week was rough, and by Thursday afternoon we were ankle-deep in empty Gatorade bottles and stray sections of Thomas the Tank Engine’s tracks, basically everything non-essential had long since gone by the wayside. As of today it looks like everyone’s on the mend (the little guy, of course, has been mended since Monday and never showed signs of backsliding) and we’ll get everything under control again in a few days.
Anyway. If I had blogged yesterday, specifically about the little guy as promised, I most likely would have talked about something that happened a few nights ago. Some nights we put him down in the crib and he almost immediately passes out, some nights he talks to himself for a long while but eventually drifts off, and sometimes he stays quiet and possibly dozes for a few short minutes, but then starts screaming and crying until someone goes in to check on him. And because this seems to be an intermittent behavior that’s not being reinforced by our response to it, we do go check on him, and as often as not it’s some little thing like the little guy’s inability to find his stuffed lion again in the dark, or needing just “one more hug”. So a few nights ago he started the post-bedtime yowling, and I went up to his room, and I was already lifting him out of his crib as I asked “Do you need another hug?” He answered “I need a five.” Which I had to puzzle out, in the moment – five what? Five more Goldfish crackers (his usual bedtime snack)? A fifth bedtime story? Top Five Reasons Why Going To Bed Early Is Awesome?
Then, sudden clarity: “Do you mean you need a high five?” Which elicited a slow, pouty, but definitively affirmative nod of his sleepy little head. So up went my hand, and he slapped it, and I laid him back down and tucked him in, and he fell asleep shortly thereafter, and all was well. The kid cracks me up.
That might very well count as a Random Anecdote, too, but I think I can dig deeper than that to try to finish the week out strong. Back in college, I worked on the campus humor/satire magazine (which is, in fact, how my wife and I met since we were both on the staff, the first of many, many things we would learn over the years that we have in common – but this random anecdote is not about her) and the mag was a very minor voice in the overall publications output of the university. It came out at the end of each semester and was probably only about 20 pages long. The official staff of the magazine, which was basically everyone who came to the weekly meetings or helped put together the physical end-product in some way, totaled something like eight or ten people and ended up writing most of the content of each edition, but there was a submissions process by which someone who didn’t work on the mag could still be published in it. Arguably that was yet another task for the full-timers, reviewing these submissions for publication.
There’s actually a whole trove of anecdotes I could relate about those magazine days, but one in particular recurred to me yesterday, while I was home sick. Well, not home really, but while I was out with the little guy. Usually on Thursdays he goes for an hour in the morning to an activity class called Toddlin’ Time at our neighborhood dance studio (which, by the way, yeah, we have one of those) and yesterday since I was home and on the crest of the illness-wave around 10:30 while my wife was taking on water fast in the trough, I took the little guy over. And basically it’s 45 minutes of semi-structured chaos with a gaggle of two-year-olds throwing themselves around a padded room and a bunch of giant padded toys. I was impressed (and told my wife as much and she agreed she had noticed the same thing) that none of the moms let their respective kids run amok, but rather were very sure to stay just close enough to make sure nothing untoward happened. It’s a weird thing, for me, trying to teach my boy how to be a decent human being while at the same time teaching myself to be a parent, and if I’ve adopted any conscious philosophy at all it’s mostly “wait and see”, meaning I try not to jump in and fix things right away, if there’s still any chance the little guy might handle things on his own. So, all things being equal, if my little guy is playing with something and another kid comes along and tries to take it, I’d like to give things a moment to play out, and see if my little guy will willingly share, or lose interest and move on to something else, or if it’s going to turn into the infamous “teachable moment”. But at Toddlin’ Time, when such a scenario plays out, in swoops the other kid’s mom with a swift “no, no, he was playing with that!” Which, again, I appreciate people not being slack when they let their kids off the leash, but how’s anybody supposed to learn anything? And then of course it makes me wonder if I should have jumped in first, and said “OK, buddy, time to share!” before the mom could tell her kid what to do. I really don’t care what the mom thinks of me, by the by, I just want my son to get a sense of the importance of meaningful virtues.
Which is all well and good but by now you’re probably wondering what that has to do with college humor magazines. Fair enough. It was never an out and out, one-faction-against-the-other kind of thing, but there were people on the mag who just wanted to publish stuff that was funny, and people who wanted to publish things which were satire, and I always came down on the satire side. But satire is hard to do, it’s hard enough to define, let alone to pull off creatively, and I know I spent more time ruminating about it than actually doing it. But in the course of all that rumination I came up with a few principles that meant something to me, namely that satire is important, and doesn’t always have to be liked but should be tolerated, because censorship is bad - I know, this is absolutely incendiary stuff. But the fact is I am and always have been a smart-ass, and I like making fun of stuff so much that it has become second nature to me, to the point where sometimes I don’t realize that I’m doing it, in fact sometimes when someone asks me point blank if I’m doing it I honestly don’t know myself. So there was clearly no small element of self-justification in declaring myself a Defender of the Importance of Satire. Given a choice between a world with or without the ability to mock things mercilessly, I choose to mock.
Except that’s not a very good value to pass on to one’s children, is it?
Back to the mag, to a specific incident. One semester someone outside the inner circle of magazine regulars submitted a piece for consideration, and I got tasked with reading it and giving a preliminary thumbs-up or thumbs-down. This would have been the year that Star Trek:Generations came out (I am too lazy to look it up right now) because the piece was a parody of that movie. I still clearly remember that it was entitled Star Trek:Defenestrations because, despite having gotten into school with pretty decent SAT Verbal scores and being an English major, I had to look that word up. The only other thing I remember is that it was not very good.
I wanted it to be good, though. I didn’t want the magazine to develop a reputation for being insular and hostile to outside submissions. I didn’t want to have to scramble for content at the last minute. Those factors would have applied to any submission, really. I think I also didn’t want to dismiss it just for being about Star Trek. I never been the biggest Trek fan myself, not because I considered myself too cool for it (OBVIOUSLY), but because there’s only so many hours in the day for things I can geek out about and I went in a different direction than learning conversational Klingon. I really, truly wanted the parody to be so funny that it transcended obsessive-nerd levels of familiarity with the source material. But it wasn’t, and didn’t. There was something altogether off about the piece, and I couldn’t, and didn’t, recommend it for inclusion.
And much, much later I realized that the reason why I think satire is so culturally and philosophically important is not because it’s so great to be able to make fun of everything, but because it’s liberating to be able to make fun of those in power. That’s what justifies satire, the way it can take down a peg or two our leaders, our institutions, our sacred cows, all of which helps us maintain some much-needed sanity-assisting perspective. Fundamentally, satire should be about mercilessly mocking the haves, not the have-nots. Making fun of the have-nots is kind of wrong. And Star Trek … if the haves are cool, then pretty much Trek’s the have-nots, right?
Of course it’s all a matter of perspective. I don’t think I had the capacity to step outside myself and think about it like this when I was 19, but whoever wrote Star Trek:Defenestrations was a gigantic nerd, so deeply buried in pure unrefined dork that in his worldview, the cinematic moment where Kirk meets Picard is actually pretty cool, definitely on the side of the haves, because it's full of beautiful people doing amazing things. It’s the slightly competent king in the land of the socially inept. In their culture, it’s totally a sacred cow, and thus a ripe target for satire. I couldn’t have put that into words, but I did know on a gut level that making fun of Star Trek seemed kind of pointless and not really what I wanted the magazine to be about, because Star Trek wasn’t one of the sacred cows of the campus in general. From the Board of Visitors to the Greek system, hey, open season. But no shooting nerds in a barrel.
And just like that, I don’t feel like such a hypocrite trying to raise a halfway-decent human being. It’s acceptable to make fun of things that are dumb and people who deserve it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I will be helpless to do anything but encourage that kind of behavior if (when) it emerges in my little guy. But it stops being acceptable when your targets are weaker than you. And if there’s any question which way the balance of power is tipped, err on the side of being kind. Admittedly, that last part is something I could use a little improvement on myself. But it’s a start. I’m still learning as I go.
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