Travelin' show

I’ve realized that I have a lot fewer craziness-of-commuting stories these days, and even fewer still that are worth even mentioning here on the blog. A week ago I experienced a moment of awestruck gratitude not to be on Interstate 66. I had left work early to pick up the kids on the little girl’s first day of daycare, and after getting off the VRE and getting in my car I heard a report on the news about the old Highway of Doom – apparently there was a truck fire involving a hay trailer, which of course was sited (a) on the westbound side I would have taken home from the Metro and (b) almost immediately west of the Metro which is where the traffic on 66 always snarls even on a good day. But as profound as the there-but-for-the-grace moment was at the time, it was quickly forgotten and thus hasn’t even come up until now.

But despite (or more accurately because of) the lack of drama associated with the easier and more direct train, I am enjoying my new mode of commuting, even though (as I mentioned previously) it does render my annual tradition of Beach Books on a Bus something of a misnomer. Still, semantics notwithstanding, the tradition must go on! Because basically I am the kind of person who does something twice and then becomes so co-dependently attached to perpetuating it some form of intervention may eventually be required.

(Before I plunge into my recent reading list, however, you know what makes for great summer reading? All the short stories (including mine!) in How the West Was Weird Volume 2! Now available at Amazon.com!)

I’m not sure whether or not BBB 2011 started with The Lost City of Z by David Grann. It’s a non-fiction book composed of equal parts academic research and investigative journalism, not the usual unapologetically trashy genre-ghetto fare which is BBB’s whole reason for being. But the main subject matter is drawn from the pulp-tastic era of exploration in the early 20th century, and evokes everything from Indiana Jones to The Lost World, so that has to count for something. It’s the kind of book I would read for fun at the beach, at any rate.

If that doesn’t qualify, then BBB indisputably got underway with the continuing sci-fi epic of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah. My Little Bro is a big fan of the Dune books but up until this summer I had only ever read the eponymous first novel in the series, so if nothing else I was looking forward to being able to discuss the expanded world-building with him. I grabbed book two in paperback at the used book store for 35 cents and I can confidently say it was worth every penny! It’s so radically different from the first book that I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed it on its own merits. I also picked up the third book, Children of Dune, for 70 cents recently and may very well end up reading that before this summer is over.


Next up was Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, which was a paperback published in the early 90’s that made its way into my possession not long after but which somehow I was forever putting off reading. I believe I started it once, I don’t remember when, and it just didn’t grab me, so I always believed that reading it would be a chore and there was always something else more pressing to read first. I must have packed up and moved that book at least seven or eight times since graduating college. Now that I’ve finally conquered it, I’m not sure why I was so resistant to it all this time. The early, abortive attempt must have come at a strange time that limited my receptiveness to it, though again it’s hard to reconstruct what that would have been. The novel is a love letter to the pop entertainments of male childhood in the mid-20th century: comic books, rock and roll, baseball, monster movies, stop me of any of this sounds extremely familiar. And it’s done in a style which I’m just going to call American magical realism, and that part probably doesn’t sound familiar but my senior thesis for my English major was on American urban legends and I did a lot of research on the literature of magical realism throughout that project and it’s one of my nerdier obsessions, so yeah a story of pure unfettered geek-Americana where the protagonist at one point loses his dog but then wills the dog to keep living as a zombie dog until he realizes that’s no good for either of them and releases the dog to go be the pet of the ghost of a local boy who died in a fire … THIS IS ALL KINDS OF MY BAILIWICK. But, not to sound too ungrateful about such a custom-tailored thing existing, the book was just kind of all right. It did make me want to check out more McCammon, though, so that’s something.

You may also recall that I promised this year during BBB I would balance out the book-reading with a fair amount of SMOAT (summer movies on a train) but sadly I have even less to report on that front. I did finally watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! Which was something of an embarrassing gap because it’s such a geek shibboleth, but man, that movie is not very good. The follow-up to that was going to be Jaws, an even more egregious oversight in my lifelong film intake, but the DVD copy sent to me by Netflix was unwatchably jacked up and kept skipping and stuttering every few minutes. I’ve already sent it back and gotten a replacement, so hopefully the second attempt will fare better.

Now if this absurd triple-digit heatwave would blow out of town so that I’m not totally spent after my fifteen-minute walk to the train platform in the late afternoon, which reduces me to doing way more sleeping on the VRE in the evenings than reading or movie-watching, I’d appreciate it immensely.

Seven Eleven Eleven

This morning I went skimming back through blog entries from about a year ago to ascertain how I had commemorated my wife’s birthday in 2010. I belatedly realized that, technically in a day-of fashion, I didn’t, because her birthday fell on a Sunday last year and Sundays are far and away my least-likely-to-post days. But on the day after her birthday I recapped our indulgently decadent double-dinner adventures of the night before, so there’s that.


Of course, a mere matter of days later my wife would be newly pregnant with the little girl, which leads in turn to us having a three-month-old one year later, and means that as we (and, therefore, the world) celebrate the magnificence of another year of my wife’s life today we find ourselves in differently proscribed circumstances. They are happy circumstances, beyond any conceivable argument, but they are almost the opposite of a year ago. One summer ago our little guy was getting big enough to be left overnight with his grandparents while his mother and I enjoyed a mini-getaway; now we’re back to keeping the needs of an infant first and foremost in any social planning (or lack thereof). Also around this time last year we were feeling good about the steady decrease of daycare fees (or “tuition” as the centers call it, which never fails to amuse) from our household outlay as the little guy got older; tomorrow I’ll hand over the second (of what will be many) staggeringly ballooned check for daycare costs now that we have two little ones enrolled at once.

Timing is a funny thing! But my wife is taking it all in stride, good spirits and good humor intact. We may not be logistically able to wander the city streets at our leisure or financially able to satisfy every culinary craving, but we will make do. Yesterday we bought a no-frills DVD player and a three-shelf bookcase; I spent a bit of the afternoon assembling the latter and hooking up the former to our old tv in the basement, so that it will now be possible to watch movies and such while working out. We also managed to get out to Wegman’s* yesterday and pick up a celebratory pie for the birthday girl, which will be the dessert-a-la-mode after her requested, reasonably-priced takeout dinner. (Chipotle. Of course.)

So not exactly the rock-n-roll lifestyle, but we’re happy and life is good and points earned in the previous year will simply roll forward to be applied to a subsequent out-of-control over-the-top birthday celebration at some point in the future. And my wife earns a LOT of points in any given year. I am a lucky, lucky guy.

(* You might think grocery shopping at Wegman’s is not really in keeping with the budget austerity we are currently attempting to enforce, but while the big W has lots of fancy, gourmet prepared foods and whatnot which are in fact luxuries, the only thing we picked up in that category was the pie. Their staple foods are pretty reasonably priced and in fact, as we discovered yesterday with no small amount of pleasant surprise, Lean Pockets are hella-cheaper at Wegman’s. So there you go.)

Tourons

I went to college in Williamsburg, VA, which is home (or reasonably adjacent) to multiple tourist attractions. That creates an interesting dynamic in the town between the locals who happen to live there, the students who reside on campus for eight months out of every year, and the families who visit for a few random days on vacation. One oft-repeated joke was that there were few things more annoying than blearily making your way from your dorm to an academic building, probably around mid-morning but feeling like a crueler earlier hour due to the previous night’s festivities, running late as usual, and being flagged down by a dweeb wearing a fanny pack wondering how to find the butter-churning re-enactments. We generally referred to these more obnoxious tourist types as “tourons” which of course is just a portmanteau of “tourist” and “morons”, but I always liked the fact that it sounded like a rare type of subatomic particle, just another aspectof the nature of the universe, omnipresent and unavoidable. (I’m sure the locals had their own disparaging names for the college kids, but I remained blissfully unaware of those.)


I’ve had that old made-up word on the tip of my tongue lately because we are heading into the heart of summer and the capital area is approaching high tide in terms of visitors and sightseers and whatnot. The odd thing is that I barely work in what’s generally considered the capital area. Yes there’s a stop on the Metro lines hereabouts but there aren’t any monuments or large parks or anything noteworthy outside of massive office buildings, a few business-traveler hotels, and an extravagant number of restaurants. Yet every day lately while I’m walking from the train station to my office or back again, I see families in summer casual attire looking vaguely lost. And yes, I have been stopped once or twice and asked where that Metro station is. I try not to think much about these far-afield tourists one way or the other, because if I do let my mind wander that way it ends up grumbling about how I just need everyone to stay out of my way so I can get to work (or home as the case may be).

(This attitude was not helped in the slightest by an incident a couple of weeks ago when I got on the VRE in the morning and then watched a family get on at the next stop, equipped with a metric ton of luggage. I assume they were taking the train all the way to Union Station to switch to an Amtrak line, though they could have been going to Crystal City to get the Metro to National Airport. Anyway. The family took up four seats themselves, but also piled up their suitcases in front of a bench of five folding seats, essentially taking them out of use. I felt like screaming at them that it was a weekday morning and they had boarded a commuter train during rush hour when it’s always full and good for them for being on vacation but the rest of the world isn’t and what the hell is WRONG with you? Felt like it, but didn’t, of course.)

My parents and Little Bro and I went on a lot of traveling vacations in the summertime when I was a kid. In point of fact, we went to Williamsburg once, though I don’t remember us expecting any of the college students to serve as impromptu tour guides. (Not that there were many students on campus that time of year anyway.) But in addition to the ‘Burg, most of the places we went were more recreationally inclined, from Lake George up in New York to Myrtle Beach down in South Carolina. (We almost never went anywhere we couldn’t drive, in the summer; sometimes in the winter we’d jet down to visit the grandparents in Florida.) So I don’t remember ever feeling like I was intruding on the non-vacationing, working world on any of those trips. We never had a family vacation to, say, Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles. Maybe that was because my dad commuted into Manhattan every day for over a decade, and when he got his vacation in the summer the last thing he wanted was to go someplace with skyscrapers and a mass transit system. Or alternatively, maybe the fact that we lived so close to New York City and enjoyed its various offerings as no big deal meant that any other U.S. city would have suffered by comparison and didn’t merit becoming a getaway destination.

I look forward to traveling with my own family as the kids get a little older, and I tend to think we’ll probably gravitate towards mountain lakes and laid back beaches as well. But if we do broaden our horizons to include urban adventures, I am positive I won’t take for granted that rush hours and office work and so on are just as common in July and August as any other time of year.

Start and start again

OK, really and truly now, our daughter is attending daycare. We’ve navigated from my wife’s return to work a couple of weeks ago, where she (my wife) had to cope with letting the baby out of her sight for the majority of a waking day yet knew she (the baby) was safe at home all the time with Nana; to a couple of acclimating drop-ins at the daycare center of no more than an hour or so; to a slightly truncated day at daycare on Tuesday which ended when I picked up both kids a couple hours early (which involved leaving work about two and a half hours early, something I’m going to be hustling to make up for over the rest of the pay period, but it was worth it); to finally yesterday which was the first of many essentially typical days of daycare, the kids dropped off in the morning (on the early side, even, as that’s how Wednesdays have to go given my wife’s work schedule) and not fetched out again until 5:30 or so. And as I predicted, once again the little girl was pretty mellow about the whole thing and no calamitous maladjustment has been reported.

(I know I covered the same basic material yesterday but there’s a very good chance that my mother-in-law skipped reading the Wednesday post in its entirety because it was are-you-kidding-me another He-Man diatribe, so the preceding was mostly for her catch-up benefit.)

If I haven’t expressly said it before, I don’t think of daycare as a necessary evil, or evil of any sort. I’m not even neutral on it, or silver-lining-seekingly optimistic; I genuinely believe it’s a good thing. I like that it socializes children with other children, and exposes their tiny immune systems to creeping cruds they might as well toughen up against while also giving them opportunities to develop mentally and emotionally with their peers. I like that, when it starts before they can even walk or talk or focus more than 12 inches away from their eyeballs, it turns “school” into something that’s always been a part of their lives since before they can remember, a reason to get out of bed and get dressed and leave the house, which on the one hand gives them something in common with mom and dad, and on the other means state-mandated kindergarten in a couple years won’t be a mind-blowing shock to their system.


So I’m not exactly torn up or sad about the transition of the little girl into daycare, multiple running starts notwithstanding. Everything’s going according to plan. But in a larger sense, it is another step away from that magical timeless moment of baby’s entrance into the world. It does bring to mind that kindergarten is around the corner and five years can go by in a flash (indeed almost 60% of that has gone by for the little guy already) and time keeps on slippin’, slippin’. It’s not so much where we are that gets to me, it’s just the knowledge that for good or bad there’s no turning back, ever. At least that's the universal condition, though, so if everyone else has to deal with it the same as me I really shouldn't complain.

Springtime In Eternia (5)

So my daughter spent her first full day at daycare yesterday, which was a major milestone approached in our household by equal parts impatience and dread. The latter simply because it’s hard on a gut level to reconcile the necessity of daycare with the impulse to just forget everything in the world outside of being a primary caretaker for the flesh of your flesh; the former because we knew that same necessity was essentially unavoidable and we’d all feel a lot better once we had gotten through it to the other side.

As it happened the day was utterly unremarkable. The little girl spent about six hours at the center, from 9:30 to 3:30, and reportedly had a perfectly lovely day. She drank her bottled breastmilk, she took naps, she had her diaper changed, she squirmed playfully. No freakouts to speak of. Today is Day Two and although I made a special point of heading home early yesterday, and today she won’t be picked up until closer to 5:30, I expect the debrief will run in much the same vein. She’s a little trooper.

I felt it only proper that I at least touch on my daughter’s daycare beginnings here before getting to the conclusion (long overdue, yes I know it’s no longer June and way past the end of spring) of my ruminations on the Masters of the Universe. On the one hand, it’s a significant enough occurrence that it merits acknowledgement sooner rather than later. But on another hand, while this whole He-Man riff started because I was letting the little guy play with Castle Grayskull and then wondering how said fortress should be populated with action figures, there are a few elements therein which bear directly on the little guy’s baby sister as well. So, without further ado …

PART FIVE: HEROINE-ISM

I believe I made it clear early on that, in an informal poll of my friends, both Teela and Evil-Lyn made strong showings. And I mentioned that I think a large part of that is due to the formulaic constructions of heroic fantasy which tends to set up a Main Guy, His Sidekick, and the Girl (often equally formulaically mirrored by the Main Evil Dude, His Sidekick, and the Bad Girl). What I didn’t get into at the time was the fact that there were a few actively dissenting voices which I think, in the interest of fairness, merit hearing out.


One point raised was the idea of my little guy, or any boy aged three to seven, having any interest at all in “girl dolls”. Of course I could go round and round numerous times trying to pin down exactly what that means, in the vast gray area between toys clearly made for boys which happen to depict female characters, to toys which are intended to appeal to children of both genders but maybe slightly more to girls than boys, to toys clearly marketed right at the female side of the playground. I think it’s particularly telling that the Teela action figures have hairdos made of sculpted plastic, just like He-Man himself does, even though the body mold used for Teela is slender and curvy as opposed to the roided-up bulk of her male allies. But at the same time, the She-Ra dolls all have hair like Barbie that could ostensibly be brushed or otherwise played with. In that light I can definitely see how She-Ra, despite being essentially a distaff version of He-Man herself, would be considered a “girl doll”, whereas I would argue that Teela is at the very least a gender-neutral toy and probably a girl character made for boys.

But really, when it comes to my little guy in particular, I don’t think he would be put off by female characters. He has already demonstrated that he is convinced the character of Percy from Thomas the Tank Engine is a girl. I don’t believe he has rigid gender definitions in his little head yet, and who knows, maybe in this crazy 21st century he was born into we’ve moved quite a bit past all that than we had back in 1982. My dad was undeniably old-school about gender-appropriate behavior, and toys, and since it was just me and Little Bro growing up we didn’t have any girly stuff about. (I was too old for Cabbage Patch Kids when they came out, but my Little Bro wanted one. He was disabused of that notion post-haste.) At least partly in reaction to that, I’ve tried to be more gender-neutral with my son, and I know he plays with baby dolls at daycare and he loves his kitchen playset at home, and also his favorite thing to do with toy cars and trains is crash them, so it all balances out. The point being if I were to bid on a mixed lot of MOTU toys on eBay that had a He-Man and a Skeletor and most of a Trap Jaw and a Buzz-Off and also a Mermista (She-Ra’s mermaid friend) I would not hesitate to turn over all five of those figures to my little guy. And there’s a good chance he would think Mermista’s green nylon hair was awesome. (He would be right, too.)

And I suppose there’s something self-serving at play here, too, as I am through sheer force of will choosing to believe that every figure from Beast Man to Castaspella is gender-neutral because not only does that mean the little guy can play with whomever or whatever he wants but also that when his sister gets a little older, she can play with them too if she’s so inclined. I’m sure this verges on overthinking (as most everything passing through my mind does at one point or another) but I have to consider what I would say if my daughter were to go through a bin of Masters of the Universe toys looking for a character with whom she could escapist-fantasy identify, and she found nothing but male characters. Would I throw her brother under the bus and say he never wanted any of the girl-character toys? Blame myself? Blame society?!? Or, y’know, geez man just throw a couple of chicks with swords and guns in there too from the get-go, OK?

But that, in turn, begs an altogether different question which another one of my buddies articulated: is it ever all right to hit girls? The indisputable fact is that Teela is not some pink-gowned princess who exists only for He-Man to save her from Skeletor’s evil clutches. She’s a warrior fighting right alongside the boys. But there’s a whole host of entanglements that come along with that, which I am beginning to think of as Everything Is Different Now Redux.

The original Everything Is Different Now, you might recall, centers around the fact that I used to not mind action-adventure clichés like children in peril, but now that I’m a dad they tear my heart out and otherwise make me an easy mark for emotional manipulation. The Redux, then, is the fact that I used to be aware of but not hugely in awe of gender inequities in the world, but now that that I have a daughter I am hyper-vigilant about them. So, I grew up with action figures and army men and fake guns and all that and I have no problem letting my son have access to the same. In the case of action figures in particular, I know the primary way they get put to use is not exactly to act out homilies about cooperation and sharing. They are intended to be smashed into each other in violent pantomimes on the level of pro wrestling and Saturday morning cartoons. I have no problem with the thought of a child using two action figures to act out He-Man stomping on Beast Man’s head, nor vice versa. I also don’t have a problem with Teela stomping on Beast Man’s head … but vice versa? It’s at least the outer edges of discomfort, there.

My buddy contextualized this by saying (in effect) that if you give a boy Teela you also have to give him Evil-Lyn because they’re the only two who are allowed to punch each other. The boy characters can’t lay a hand on either of the ladies, because that wouldn’t be right, not so much within the barbaric post-apocalyptic society of Eternia but in terms of the message absorbed by the real-world little boy at play. And to be totally honest I’m just not sure if I agree with that conclusion or not. It’s all well and good to say “girls can do anything boys can do” and live up to it both for my son’s sake and my daughter’s, but I get all knee-jerk traditionalist when I wonder if “anything” includes “take a shot from a spiked mace right between the eyes”. I have a feeling I’m going to be wondering about that one for a while.

Over/Underdog

There are few things more nonsensical and unappealing than going to a post-sundown fireworks display with a toddler and a newborn (except, arguably, a pre-sundown fireworks display?) so I had not incorporated any pyrotechnic expectations into looking forward to Independence Day. I also managed to attend a cookout on Sunday attended by many of my old college friends, which afforded me ample access to my oft-mentioned current vices of choice (red meat, sweets and booze) in appropriately patriotic formats (burgers, pie and domestic beer), and I took advantage of said access with gusto, which similarly obviated the need to incorporate same into the actual Fourth of July. So on the holiday itself, there was really only one thing I needed in order to feel like my day off from work was well spent. And that of course was watching the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest broadcast live from Coney Island on ESPN at noon.


And we managed it, too, the whole family foursome gathered around the tv to watch the spectacle unfold in glorious realtime. I don’t really have a profoundly major point to make about either our nation’s birthday or the Nathan’s contest itself, but I wanted to share a few random accompanying thoughts.

- I was rooting for the above-pictured Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti, ranked #2 competitive eater in the world and (as it turns out) doomed to lose once again to the unstoppable Joey Chestnut. What can I say, as long as we’re not talking about the New York Yankees (and after yesterday, yeah, let’s not) I enjoy cheering for an upset. Plus Bertoletti rocks the Mohawk and the fu-manchu mustache in a way I can’t help but respect.
- I give the Nathan’s folks a lot of credit for showmanship. It’s remarkable and absurd that the hot dog eating contest gets an hour of airtime on ESPN every year at this point, but it is a pretty entertaining hour at that. I made a special point of pantomime-tipping my hat when they finally got around to announcing soon-to-be five-time champ Joey Chestnut, who apparently had chosen The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” as his entrance music. That song has a long intro with a gradual build and the MC did a fine job of ratcheting up the crowd noise as the song escalated and finally calling out Chestnut’s name pretty much when the song breaks wide open. I love that song but was having a hard time figuring out how it tied to the whole theme of the competition until I was reminded of the opening lines (“Out here in the fields/I fought for my meals”. Well played, Mr. Chestnut.)
- ESPN actually did a SportsScience feature on competitive eating techniques which was fascinating. Some of the aspects they covered I already knew, since I’ve been obsessed with the Nathan’s contest since around 2005 or so. But other stuff blew my mind. Like the Valsalva Maneuver. Oh and also the little nugget that eating 60-some hot dogs is the caloric equivalent of what most people eat in five days? That more than anything to me represents what’s so all-American – good and bad – about the Nathan’s contest. (It also made me want to give about 200 bucks to the local food pantries and soup kitchens.)
- So this year they had qualifying events in China, where Nathan’s franchises are soon to be opening up. And that, in my mind, is why the USA is going to win. Win what, exactly, I’m not quite sure, but basically I’m not willing to concede the world to China just yet.
- Usually one of the fun things about watching the contest is keeping an eye on the tally-girls (the young ladies with the numbered flip-pads who are responsible for showing how many hot dogs each competitor has eaten as they go, for the benefit of the crowd at Coney Island) because at least once you’ll see one of those gals making an absolutely horrified, disgusted where-did-my-life-plan-to-make-money-off-being-pretty-go-wrong face. But that didn’t happen this year – I think someone must have coached the ladies to keep smiling NO MATTER WHAT.
- The hour-long special is about 45 minutes of pre-game show, the actual ten-minute race, and five minutes of wrap-up. For that first ¾ of an hour my wife kept saying she was craving hot dogs. I asked her if she still wanted hot dogs at about the mid-point of the contest and at that point I did in fact get a good expression of horror and disgust.
- Also weird and funny were the attempts made by me and my wife to explain to the little guy (a) what the heck was going on on the tv and (b) how he should never ever emulate it. “What are those guys doing?” “Eating too fast and taking way, way too big of bites.” “Why?” “Um … for fun?”
- Despite my love of New York in general I’ve actually never been to Coney Island. And I think it’s much better to watch the hot dog eating contest on tv, but I do need to get up there one of these summers.

So, no parades or sparklers this year but still a good Fourth for me and mine. And now it’s on to a short workweek to kick off the remainder of summer characterized by heat, humidity and no more holidays until Labor Day. At least I no longer have to drive on 66 every day; when it comes to mass transit preferences I’m happy to be thoroughly un-American in that regard.

Damn you, Fisher-Price

Last night my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I mentioned earlier this week that the actual date fell on Monday, but my wife had the misfortune of picking up some kind of stomach bug last weekend and as of Monday evening still wasn’t feeling up for any kind of outing. But we did want to make the most of the hypothetical opportunities provided by my mother’s continued presence in our home before she leaves (early tomorrow morning), and we settled on Thursday as the best rescheduling option (mainly because Thursday is my wife’s day off, and when she works she rarely gets home before 9 p.m. and then too exhausted for anything approaching social gallivanting).

So we finally got a chance to check out for ourselves a local joint that came recommended from several people who have lived in our town far longer than our eighteen months (so far). It’s a Mexican restaurant, but also offers Spanish-style food, including both Spanish and Mexican influenced tapas. That (plus the obligatory presence of Mexican beer) made a pretty compelling case, and we ended up splitting half a dozen tapas dishes from both sides of the menu. The food was tasty but the kitchen was lamentably slow, although our waitress did explain that they were simultaneously preparing the catering for a large wedding, so at least it wasn’t entirely unacknowledged. (The waitress also brought us a second helping of the chips and salsa verde gratis while we waited, and that salsa verde was muy ridiculoso.)

I had honestly believed, in the days and weeks immediately following our exchange of vows, that there was a very good chance I would take my wife back to Hawaii to celebrate our fifth anniversary, and possibly every five-year interval thereafter (because Hawaii is awesome). Of course, if anyone had asked, I also would have said there was a very good chance my wife and I would have (at least!) two kids by the time we had been married five years, too. And the inherent contradiction in those two beliefs never really occurred to me. But needless to say we have both made peace with scaling things like adventurous travel way, way back for the time being. (But I’ve got my eye on 2016, oh yes I have.)

Speaking of the children, I was pretty proud of my wife and myself for largely confining our dinner conversation to subject matter other than our children. But of course reality intrudes as it must and my wife mentioned that we were running low on some things which needed replacing sooner rather than later and would be easiest found at the local Babies R Us. So once we had finished enjoying our meal we got in the car and drove across town to the store in question. In our town, the Babies R Us is actually a department that takes up maybe 30 to 40% of the floorspace of the Toys R Us. Much as I love windowshopping at Toys R Us I sincerely had no intention of doing so last night, and I thought I had a good strategy to ward against it. I dropped my wife off at the door and she went in while I parked the car. The Babies R Us is of course in the back corner of the store, so I hustled to catch up with her, thus preventing myself from lingering too long over the ninja and alien Legos displays. Once I helped my wife locate the supplies I led the way back to the checkout lanes, and I did so by cutting through some of the smaller aisles rather than following the major thoroughfare of the store, because that latter path goes right past the action figures and such aimed at adolescent boys (and the adolescent-minded like me).

I thought my bushwhacking approach was safer because it would only expose me to the toys for the pre-school set, which of course I find cut but I tend not to get all hypnotized by. Until I saw this on a shelf at my exact eye level:


COME ON. I knew that Fisher-Price’s Imaginext line had made a Green Lantern toy, because I bought it for the little guy well in advance of his second birthday. I figured if daddy has a bunch of GL action figures, the little guy might as well have his own age-appropriate version as well. But now there’s a whole age-appropriate playset (including a couple of alien Green Lanterns and clearly yes I recognize them from the comics) for him, but no equivalent for me? I am not proud of this but I do admit it, I am more than a little envious of this development. And while my little guy likes playing with his Green Lantern sometimes, he’s nowhere near as enamored of it as he is of his Pixar Cars and Thomas and Friends and so on. Which means if I were to buy the Imaginext Deluxe Planet Oa and wrap it up and present it to my son on his third birthday, it would be stunningly transparent that I had really bought it for myself. (The little guy has already requested that we get him some Chuggington trains for his birthday, anyway.)

So yeah. Killing me, Fisher-Price. Killing. Me.