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Posts for the date of Friday, November 22, 2002
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posted by Gary O'Brien at 1:51 PM |
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With great power comes great responsibility. So I’ve learned from the very wise and world-weary Uncle Ben Parker. You may not know Uncle Ben, but he is primarily responsible for the moral development of Spider-Man. Funny that I should learn lessons from fictional characters. Comic book characters, no less.
But he was a father. Not in the biological sense, but in the nurturing sense. A father whose primary responsibility was to shape and guide the future of a young child. And that he did, in all his ink and paint glory, until his untimely death.
I suppose you’re trying to figure out what I’m talking about, huh? It’s the concept of fatherhood and where it comes from. What does it mean to be a father?
I’m the father of two lovely, wonderful girls. One biologically, one in the nurturing sense. But I’m a father nonetheless. My primary role is to shape and guide these two children into good human beings. I often lay awake at night wondering what my girls will be when they grow up. Their futures are boundless. They can be singers, dancers, scientists, doctors, actors, writers, artists, accountants, astronauts or carnies. As long as they stay out of prison I don’t think I would love them anymore if they scrubbed deep fryers for a living or if they discovered a new law of the physical world. As long as they take pride in their work and are happy, I’m happy.
As a father, I want to be present for every moment. Every moment of glory and pain, for they come in equal doses, though sometimes the pain seems to outweigh the glory.
I often wonder if I am alone in this outlook. Every morning I wait at the bus stop with Matilda. I’ve done so since the first day she went to kindergarten and hope to do so with Gertrude and any of their subsequent siblings. The first concept a child usually learns is “bye bye”. We’re forever saying goodbye to people and I want to instill in them that most goodbyes are only fleeting. That they only last for a short period of time. Don’t fear the goodbyes, but rejoice in the embraces.
But I look at the bus stop and see so many children who are shuffled off into their days alone. Most of the time, it’s no big deal to them. They are happy to run and play with their friends. But sometimes, something happens. And where do they turn if their parent isn’t within reach? Is it not our jobs to help explain to them that, sometimes, the universe bites back?
Ever since Matilda was in kindergarten, the neighborhood children, and usually the bullies, come to me for guidance in these situations. And increasingly so.
It started with explaining to a group of nascent ruffians why they shouldn’t throw rocks at passing cars. Now, in your adult mind it makes perfect sense to you NOT to do this. But children, in their often wonderful and sometimes dangerous curiosity, have to find out for themselves what the consequences are. They just have to know what will happen if they hit a Honda Accord with a rock.
Unfortunately, this practice can hurt someone. And the kids understood this after a nice talk. These morning discourses continued over the course of a year. Don’t put rocks under people’s tires, don’t knock on people’s doors or play on their porch, don’t hit each other with sticks. Again, common sense to us, but not to a kid.
Slowly but surely, these kids saw that they could trust me. And they started coming to me to solve their morning problems. Broken parts of assignments that are due that morning are routinely fixed on my kitchen table with whatever materials we have on hand. Collections of things that are brought for show and tell are often touted on my doorstep. I’m introduced to relatives, and I often stave off tears of lonely kids seeking their parents.
Increasingly, moments of fate crashing down upon a young child’s psyche are causing my doorbell to ring before the bus comes. So and so called me a name. This kid kicked me. That one stole my backpack. No one likes me.
We have the safe house. All the kids at the bus stop know me and can call me by name. I say hello to fourteen kids separately every morning and sometimes explain things like stars and space travel to an interested fourth grader as we all stand stomping our feet in the cold.
I’ve played rock, paper, and scissors with most of the first graders and have protected more than my fair share of misfits from ridicule. And, more than once, I’ve heard tidbits of my own wisdom about name-calling and bullying shot back at the perpetrators of the pain.
I dispense band-aids, ice and advice at the bus stop. I’m friend to all and trusted by everyone.
It’s because of my wife that I’ve realized that I’m a surrogate father to many of these kids. Outside of the bus stop, I don’t know much about them. For all I know, they could have a great family at home. Or their dad could be an alcoholic. Or they could live with their grandparents. I just don’t know. Not that it matters.
But it’s a staggering thought when you open the door to realize that the neighborhood depends upon you to be there, just in case they need you. For twenty minutes a day I inherit an extra twenty kids. It’s an awesome responsibility, but a welcome one.
Fathers just do things, without being asked. You want a piano? We’ll get you one. Puppies appear as if by will and we make great horses. We can explain physics and art. It’s just some of the things that dads know. And when you need us, we’re there.
Whether or not you’re our kid, we’re there to pick you up and help you brush off and set you out on your way.
Maybe someday I’ll meet these kids’ parents. Maybe not. But hopefully, when they are in the same position, they’ll do the same thing.
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Posts for the date of Thursday, November 21, 2002
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posted by Gary O'Brien at 8:52 AM |
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As we speak right now, a friend of mine knows exactly what the gender of her child is. Three people in the world know this information right now. She and her husband and the technician that worked the sonogram.
Now the time starts ticking down. How long before they break and tell people? It’s only a matter of time. No one can hold this sort of information for too long.
Pregnancy does weird things to you. Not me personally, of course. But to women (though husbands are somewhat affected). Secrets are no longer a matter of, well, secrecy. Delicate subjects are no longer delicate.
It starts out in hushed tones among the women of your family. They begin discussing things that you don’t want to know about. Nausea. Spotting. Blood. Clots. Smells. Fluids. It’s not something any man wants a part of and you stick your fingers in your ears and say, “lalalalalala.”
That’s because at that point the pregnancy is still an abstract. Your wife still looks normal, she’s not showing yet. Her complexion hasn’t changed. Her hair isn’t different. She’s a little tired, sure, and she pees a lot, but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Then, around five months . . . everything changes. She starts to feel big and uncomfortable and the baby is doing bizarre things to her internal organs. Suddenly these hushed conversations make their way to the public. Nausea turns into vomiting, with explicit descriptions of the retching, the environment. She no longer discretely exits to go to the bathroom. She announces that she “has to piss like a Russian race horse in August.” You don’t know what it means, but you are fearful of it. (By month nine she says things like, “I have to take a leak so bad I can taste it.”)
Of course, once you have the ultrasound, there’s no going back. You’ve seen your wife’s insides. There’s her kidney, there’s her bladder, and I think that’s her liver. My god I hope so. It changes your relationship to have intimate knowledge of your wife’s endocrine and renal systems. It’s weird, especially considering the fact that you know that she’ll never see yours without a Ginsu knife, a fifth of Southern Comfort and comments on how hot her sister looked in that nun outfit at the Halloween party.
But it doesn’t end. The baby keeps growing. And so does the discomfort. By the ninth month the baby is nearly full term and her lungs are sticking out of her ears. And every little bit of discretion your family once had is now gone. You’re discussing things like hemorrhoids with the checker at the supermarket. Suddenly it’s okay to listen to stories about mucus plugs from the Kindergarten teacher and your grandma is talking about burying placenta in the back yard for good luck.
None of this seems to bother the woman because, well, she’s just focused on getting the baby out. (And let’s not fool ourselves guys, as excited and impatient as she is, she’s also terrified. There are so many questions . . . will there be pain? Will the baby be okay? Will there be complications? What if I have to go into surgery? What if I hemorrhage? What if? What if? What if? They don’t know. Even if this is their fourth child, so many things are different and she’s terrified that something will go wrong. It’s a natural fear because, even though you can’t understand this, she already knows the baby. They already have a connection.)
So, prepare yourselves guys. Keeping the gender a secret is just one thing. There are so many other things that will come to light. But once you start talking about massaging the perineum, I’m outta here.
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Posts for the date of Wednesday, November 20, 2002
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posted by Gary O'Brien at 7:58 AM |
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Friends, neighbors and the weird guy standing in the corner. I come today not to update this page, but to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Yeah, going on a 24-hour hiatus again. Work. It’s a terrible curse, I tell you. But a necessary one. After all, they actually give me money to do things. I haven’t had that sort of arrangement since the time when I was twelve and I ate a spoonful of dirt for a dollar.
So, today I will be freaking out, realizing that all of my deadlines are coming up and I have a million things to do. Help!!!
What I didn’t tell you was that Monday and Tuesday’s entries were pre-written. Yep, I wrote them over the weekend. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.
So, for the time being you can sit here and wonder why people like Fatty Arbuckle had careers destroyed for incidents in which they were exonerated and Michael Jackson can perform genetic experiments on himself, play the racial victim, diddle little boys AND swing babies over a balcony and still have a career.
There is no karmic justice in this world. If there were, Jackson would be sexually assaulted by an elephant and then fall into a vat of skin dissolving lotion.
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Posts for the date of Tuesday, November 19, 2002
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posted by Gary O'Brien at 7:49 AM |
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A few weeks ago James Lileks brought up the new Christina Aguilera song and video “Dirty”. He spoke of how she had managed to take all the pleasure that one could derive out of the carnal acts and made them feel grimy, dirty and something akin to human plumbing. At the time I had only heard snippets of the song and hadn’t seen the video. Now that I have, I realize that Lileks was dead on. This young girl, in trying to break the taboos of society and destroy her pop princess persona has managed to take all the fun out of sex.
She dresses in chaps and a thong. An outfit the Village People would kill for. She gyrates mechanically talking about sweat and licking and lap dances. Most of what she discusses has nothing to do with erotica or pleasure but, rather, of a sexual release that many men feel they need to attain anonymously from crab-infested professionals with self-esteem issues.
But that’s beside the point. Christina is doing her job and doing it well. She has destroyed whatever image she thinks she once had and replaced it with a finely tuned persona of a town whore. I’ve never found her attractive. She’s far too skinny. But I never actually thought I’d see her ass cheeks. I have now. I’m not a better man for it.
But Christina understands how to attract a teen audience. She’s doing what she needs to do by horrifying the parents and portraying the most extreme version of sex that she can. Her video will be forbidden by parents and decried by feminists. Though she will say that her music is dealing with a sexual awakening of a female, one can’t help but think that she’s exploiting herself to sell more records. She looks like some gay cowboy’s fantasy of what a heterosexual male thinks is attractive.
In reality, she’s wrong, of course. Granted, to attract a teen boy or a pervert, the fewer clothes she wears, the better. But to attract a mass audience, she’s going about it the wrong way.
I liken it to the mating call of the teen male that you hear blaring through your neighborhood at night. The thick, distorted ba doom boom of the thumping bass that comes out of the hatchback of some stupid, souped up Honda. The boy bobs his head, drives with one hand and tries his best to attract the female of the species who, apparently, can only hear the lowest range of sounds.
He does get attention. But when I see him, I just think about how much money he spent on that sound system and how poorly he’s using it. I desperately want to sit down with him and reset his levels so that you can actually hear the whole song. Not that he cares. But, sonically speaking, he’s going about this music all wrong. Crystal clear audio is a beauty to behold.
In a way, this is what Christina is doing. She’s trying to attract by extremes. She doesn’t realize that history shows that suggestion works far better than beating someone over the head with your point. Betty Page is still considered a sex goddess because she was able to suggest sex without getting naked. The same can be said of many of the screen sirens of long ago. If you want to talk about a long-standing sexual fantasy, ask any grown male about Emma Peel and her cat suit. Or Julie Newmar. It’s the suggestion of sex that gets men riled up, not the blatant flaunting of it.
But it will take a long, long time for someone like Christina to realize this. Let’s face it, she ain’t exactly the smartest orange at the produce stand. If she wants to learn how to market herself, she should talk to Eminem. The man is a brilliant marketer. He set up a persona and does nothing to break it down. He doesn’t even talk much about it outside his music. He remains an enigma. Nothing about Christina Aguilera is an enigma anymore. I know what her butt cheeks look like. There’s no mystery.
We try to stop kids from doing things that we find pleasurable. Not because we don’t want them to experience them, but because we want them to learn control. It doesn’t just apply to sex, but also drinking, smoking, breaking things, over-eating. Teaching kids to control their impulses allows them to grow up with a good balance between what is fun and what is appropriate. There is a time and place for just about everything and a good rule of thumb is to always do whatever it is in moderation. Too much of anything, good or bad, serves no purpose.
So, Christina, I know that your new album and image is “all about the stank.” But, my dear, no one wants stank. Those that do are not the people you want to attract.
When it comes to sex, my young friend, simmering works better than boiling over. You catch more flies with honey, as they say, than with something that looks like it needs to be washed, disinfected and tested for communicable diseases.
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Posts for the date of Monday, November 18, 2002
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posted by Gary O'Brien at 12:38 PM |
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We survived our very first party hosted in our tiny little home. Hopefully, we won’t have to do this again because we should be in a house within the next year. And we’ll never have to see this dump again.
Though it was hot and crowded, it looked like everyone had a good time. Food was eaten, balloons were batted about and no one above the age of five cried (much). Outside of the fact that my mother-in-law was nearly arrested for bag piping in public, everything went off without a hitch.
The baby, of course, was cute as can be. She had a great time and I was very proud of the way she behaved. Normally, a one-year-old facing 30 people poking and prodding her, trying to get her to be cute, would be a little overwhelming. But, she was a gracious little host and even allowed herself to be held periodically by her aunts and uncles.
Overall I think she had a really good time. Once we started handing out the presents and giving her cake, she really got into the whole process. She started dancing and waving and having a great time. And it was good.
She was giving all sorts of cute clothes that make her appear to be the cutest baby on the planet (though, perhaps, I am biased). The cutest may be her fuzzy pink vest that her aunt and cousin picked out for her. Or, maybe, the PJs and purple robe that another aunt gave her. She walked around in that last night, looking cuter than can be.
The problem is that she knows that she’s cute and uses it as a weapon.
Right now, as I’m typing this, I have no Internet access. Now, for someone who runs a home business, this isn’t a good thing . . . We’re rather dead in the water at the moment. I have work that has to be done, but the only place to do it is in a place in the house that is isolated. I can’t hear the doorbell. So, if I do that, Mr. Broadband Repairman may show up and I won’t hear him.
Naturally, I had a ton of work on the Internet to do yesterday. But I couldn’t. I’m incommunicado (which is the song I’m listening to right now). To make matters worse, I had a bunch of stuff to do because John is at COMDEX and may not get Net access. I still don’t know at this point whether or not he has it. So, it’s quite possible that the pages I was supposed to do for the contest yesterday didn’t get done and we have a bunch of angry people beating down the doors of the website as we speak.
And, just before I went down, a member of the INTERCOT staff had emailed me to let me know something was wrong. I haven’t been able to reply yet. (Though by the time this is published, I’ll be able to let him know.)
So, the waiting game begins. Shortly I will begin writing a detailed table of contents for a drugs book I’m working on. Yay. My excitement is about to overwhelm me. I feel sick with it.
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