2005 is full of jive; 2006 is in the mix!

well, here we are. another year is about to tick by. it is a time for quiet reflection. it is a time for introspection and evaluation. it is a time to drink enough champagne to paralyze a bull moose.

as i type this, mrs nice guy is in the other room, nursing our child -- a perfect baby who was a much smaller being that lived inside my wife a year ago today. we have big plans for tonight, my bridelette and i: after i finish typing this, we are going to eat some Seven Onion Soup (recipe courtesy of mater-in-law nice guy -- even though i suspect she cheated by calling garlic an onion). then we are going to play scrabble and go to bed at 9:30. maybe, just maybe, we will still be awake at midnight, in which case we will give each other a stinky onionious kiss. good times.

so as i sit here sipping my bubbly, thinking back on this past year, i cannot help but be moved to maudlin sentimentality. it's trite but true: a child makes the parent a bigger, more patient person. my life is richer for her; my values have been realigned. bonus: it's also a lot cheaper to get me drunk now. so, it was a good year. let's look at some of this year's firsts, shall we? here are some things that i did this year that i had never experienced before:

* i became a father. i think this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.
* i changed my first diaper.
* before this year, i had never (as far as my wife knows) been crapped on by a tiny little person. especially not in bangkok. for $8.
* i have gotten used to the sound of skull-melting screams at 4 am.
* i turned 30, even though i still feel 13. (isn't that a jennifer garner movie or something? jesus. am i really this lame?)
* i got to eat at the inn at little washington, a singular dining experience and a little kiss goodbye from the real world. "see ya later, pal. enjoy fatherhood. we'll be just fine here without you."
* i tasted breastmilk for the first time. well, the first time in about 30 years anyway.
* i achieved my lifelong goal of not working for a living. gentlemen of the world, a little secret: marry a woman with four times your earning power. you know you've made it when all you do is stay home all day with the baby and watch educational videos trippier than anything you ever saw that one time in college you went to the Sick and Twisted Animation Festival shrooming your balls off.
* i started building my dadbody -- haven't been to the gym in about seven months. like a slimy little caterpillar, i am building a cocoon of lard around my formerly fit form, only to emerge someday a beautiful fat butterfly of a paunchy poppa.
* i did recently take a yoga class for the first time in five years. i'm so stiff i make al gore look like tommy lee. (note to self, google this later: wasn't tommy lee al gore's roommate at harvard?)
* i discovered that it is possible to love something more than myself. or scotch. ok, maybe not scotch.
* i ate at white castle for the first time.
* i learned that babies are totally rad. who knew?

i am sure there's more, but at this moment onions and scrabble are calling my name. goodbye 2005, you were a good year. 2006, you have a lot to live up to, bitch!

happy new year to all of you out there on the interweb! keep reading ... or else!

my winter christmannukkwanzyuletide solstice vacation, days 3-7: the wisdom of omi

well the rest of our trip went by relatively smoothly. the baby settled into something resembling a sleeping groove. mater-in-law stayed home with the kid one night so the wife and i could take in dinner and a movie. saw The Squid and the Whale -- excellent. the perfect heartwarming holiday movie for when you're young and hopeful and starting a new family. set in my neighborhood, no less.

and there were parties! two parties, to be exact. one christmas eve ham dinner (the host was charmingly concerned that i would object to the main course due to my semi-jewish extraction. no darling, my religious persuasion does not prevent me from eating ham. what prevents me from eating ham is that pigs are filthy animals and i refuse to eat dirty swine like a rabid dog. i spit on your christmas pork! pass me more of that delightful salad, though. do i taste pomegranate?!) and one generic holiday christmannukkwanzyuletide solstice party. at both parties the wife and i had to bolt our food and leave before 7 in order to get the kid in bed. while revelry continued on into the wee hours for everyone else, mrs nice guy and i sat joylessly on the couch in silence, staring into each others' empty eyes.

then on the Big Day, we opened presents. the baby received more presents than anyone has ever received in one sitting in the history of all time. we thought we had been clever by packing an empty bag with which to haul home loot. ha! fools! we would have needed a fleet of uhaul trucks to get all those fluffy, blinky, chirping, bouncing, educational, rolling, cuddly gewgaws home. this kid has no idea how good she has it. i've played with her toys and they're awesome. i love having a kid. i can take her new gadgets away from her to play with myself, give her some torn wrapping paper in exchange, and she won't notice the difference!

it was my second christmannukkwanzyuletide vacation ever spent away from my parents -- who are bizarrely traveling in thailand and bangladesh (i have not heard from them since they left a week ago and fear they have been sold as chattel. poor mater and pater). but it would be incorrect to say i spent it without family. my family is bigger this year and this christmas with mrs nice guy, the baby, the in-laws and especially the kid's great grandmother was an occasion to be cherished.

mostly because mrs nice guy's dutch-slovenian omi has packed in 84 years of living and can totally kick your dutch-slovenian omi's ass. my child's great-grandmother is indeed both grand and great -- and she is not afraid to sit you down and break off a piece of wisdom for you in a very close approximation of english (she speaks eight languages. how many do you speak?). i listened closely to baby nice guy's great-grandomi this week and i have recorded some of the best bits of her insight here for posterity. enjoy:

on moderation (a favorite theme): In the world they give you all advices. One is don't eat too much. Don't drink too much. Don't make too much love. And so it goes further. But anyway everybody drinks too much, he eats too much, he makes too much dingas-dongas.

on american culture: You don't sing much in the States. Maybe in Texas.

on philosophers: I like to read Emerson because he is so light, so understandable. I'm not intellectual but I can understand him and I like the things he is telling me. He tells the truth and we don't listen. He's a kind of Jesus. Jesus tells the truth and we don't listen.

on sex: Love is not enough in bed, but ... HAHA! HEE HEE!

on the pills she has to take every day: If you don't have to use this you are young. I hate it. You cannot drink. You must only eat these small things. White round and miserable! And I take a cookie.

on christmas presents (she received a natty sweater and scarf, among other things): When I was young I was dressing my child. Now my child is dressing me.

on santa claus and gift-giving: The Chrismas Man come and bring many things. Old Omi doesn't go shopping.

on doctors' orders: They tell me no drinking. No working. No enjoying myself. "Enjoying," yes, but with no drinking it's not possible.

on the baby, who was hooked on great-grandma like marion barry on crack: She loves me more [than] she loves you.

on christmas carols

if i hear all ye faithful being summonsed one more time i am going to stab my eyes out with a menorah, pa-rum pum pum pum. and what is this business about "born is the king of israel??" has ariel sharon been notified?

anyway, whatever: happy birthday baby jesus. ever since i heard you died for my sins, i have been extra super careful to commit lots of them!

my winter christmannukkwanzyuletide solstice vacation, days 1 & 2

greetings from vermont! yesterday was a big day. new yawk city was in the throes of its third transit strike in 40 years. mrs nice guy and i had to figure out how to get ourselves, the baby and the 397 pieces of luggage that we now travel with out to LaGuardia. i had called my favorite car service a good 18 hours before we needed to be picked up, figuring i had been clever to call so far in advance during the strike. i said "we need a car at 6 am." the car service lady said "we have 12 cars booked for 6 am." i said "how about 5:30?" she said "you got it." i said "christ almighty that's early even for us."

the car arrived right on time, in the deepest dark of the freezing pre-dawn hour. as mrs nice guy readied the baby, i carried our 397 bags to the waiting car, my breath freezing in the air before shattering at my feet. i loaded the car. i went upstairs and was joined by my wife and child. we got into the nice warm car only to find that we were to be crammed in with two other people! what?! 5:30 in the morning and we have to share a car to LaGuardia!? damn you, roger toussaint and your beguiling trinidadian accent!!! i was hoping to load up the car and sleep for a blissful 30 minutes or so. but no. we settle into our seats and the Perky Paula sitting shotgun turns around and says "so where are you going?!" ah yes: small talk before 6 am. i believe this has been the trigger of not a few genocides.

mrs nice guy and i respond, in unison, "burlington." Perky Paula says "OMIGOD ME TOO!!" we all marvel at this incredible coincidence.

and then we marvel at the fact that it's not yet 6 am and all of the streets in brooklyn are mired in gridlock. traffic everywhere. people going to work, desperately trying to bum a ride across one of the overloaded bridges into manhattan. post-katrina everybody was fretting about the possible need for our city to evacuate -- nobody could have guessed there was a more urgent call for an invacuation procedure. since we're not heading into the city ourselves, we gradually make it to the airport. we even get there on time! yay!

the flight itself is uneventful. in vermont we are picked up by my mater-in-law. i ask my wife to let me carry the baby off the plane because it will probably be the last time i am allowed to hold her for a week. after deplaning (man, that's an awesome word), i hand the baby over to my mater-in-law, the baby's dutch omi, who takes us back to her house, her husband and her dutch-slovenian mother.

did you catch that? did you see how many moms and daughters were in that last paragraph?! add them up: here we have baby nice guy and her mother. and of course there's my baby's mother's mother. and then there's mother's mother's mother! four generations of women! that's a lotta mama! upon walking through the front door, it dawns on me: this is not my christmas vacation. no. i am an extra in this movie, vestigial. i am an also-ran. i am the caddy and court jester of the New Matriarchy. sure, i am the father of the next generation, but my work is done. i am superfluous. redundant. the women are running the show here and i am wearing their deodorant.

so after the first day of our winter vacation -- the women's hooded robes folded and tucked away for the night, the stains from the blood sacrament dutifully scrubbed -- we go to bed. the baby is exhausted. she has not napped. her crib is in my wife's childhood room and it is too big to relocate. so this means my wife and i must move our mattress to some other part of the house. after a thorough search, it becomes apparent that the only place where we will have enough room is ... the basement. next to the heater. so we did what any good parents would do: we put the baby to sleep in my wife's rightful room and we went to sleep in the house's sweltering hades. at least we were warm.

for about 20 minutes. at 11 pm the child started to scream. this lasted until 3 am. but she did not stop screaming at this point. no. at this point mrs nice guy brought the child to our bed and banished me to the arctic living room couch, allowing me only a single blanket made from tiny clouds of marshmallow dust. i lay there until 8 am, moving from one freezing sofa (too short) to the other (too narrow) while envisioning my wife and child cuddling in the womb-warmth of the basement and plotting my hideous demise. at 8 am mater-in-law nice guy picked up the baby and i returned to my wife in the basement. she informed me that while i had been "sleeping" for the past five hours, the baby had been having a bizarre fit of nipple-biting and mattress-clawing. it seems i did not have it as badly as i thought.

anyway. today the baby behaved largely like an insane sleep-deprived caged animal in the midst of a heroic manic episode. her cheeks were a new shade of deep red so we assume she is teething some more. great timing, baby. i guess this is her idea of a gift to us: a week's worth of basement-dwelling and 3 am shrieking.

anyway. this evening she's been feeling much better. we gave her some baby advil. the child's dutch omi and great-grand-omi willl have plenty of time to whisper cabalistic anti-nice guy mysticism to her in ancient languages while i take naps. and now it's 10 pm and she has been dormant, like a volcano, for three hours. so, while i still can, i am going to shut down the computer and join my wife in the comfort of our bed, down in the warmth of her ancestral basement.

the annals of bad parenting: S is for scotch and 12 is how many

greetings friends! today we pay a visit to the Annals of Bad Parenting, brought to you by the letter S and the number 12. let's get to the nitty gritty. the courts can call this post Evidence A in the case of the people vs. mr nice guy, wherein the state will decide that i am unfit to raise anything more than a miniature cactus:

the other day as the baby was safely sound asleep in her crib, face down, strapped in and heavily sedated, i was frittering about on the internets. at about 10 am, a friend sent me a note saying he was in the neighborhood and that he would stop by. i said fine, i'll make you some coffee. minutes later he was downstairs. so i buzzed him into the building. i opened the door to my apartment. and as i stepped into the hall to greet him, i heard a solid CLICK. without turning to look for the source of the noise, i felt something deep inside of me die an instantaneous yet searingly painful death: the door was locked. the baby was inside. so were my keys.

mr nice guy, even though heart no longer beating: HOLY FUCK! BABY INSIDE! KEYS! DON'T HAVE! LOCKED! DEAD MAN!
friend, oddly more panicked than me: oh ... my ... god.

thankfully, my upstairs neighbor was home with her son. unthankfully she does not have a copy of my keys. my friend and i climbed onto her third-floor balcony and looked over the ledge onto my balcony where my sliding door sat unlocked. i ordered my friend to risk a certain instant broken neck and rappel down onto my balcony. he, selfishly, refused.

so i did what i had to do: i called my wife -- at work in manhattan, at least 30 minutes away by car -- and said in one breath with my eyes closed:
"i'mlockedoutandthebaby'sinside,pleasedon'tmakeithurt
whenyoukillme." she sighed the sigh of a woman all too accustomed to untangling the webbed follies spun by her fool of a husband. and then she got in a cab. meanwhile i tried like hell to break into my building with little success. my friend offered to get me some muffins ("anything i can do to make this easier for you, man") as i suffered visions of my baby swallowing her blanket to death.

my upstairs neighbor's retired father was hanging around the periphery of the scene with a sardonic little grin on his face. "you're not about to win father of the year, are you?" my self-loathing achieved an almost eurphoric level of purity. (i should note here that in a bizarre twilight zone twist of my life, i actually attended my upstairs neighbor's father's retirement party six years ago in washington DC -- my upstairs neighbor's father was a grizzled master in the profession i had just embarked upon. i admire him. so now we randomly meet again in brooklyn and this is impression i make?)

anyway, mrs nice guy made it home in record time. she was sitting on the roof of the taxi like some post-apocalyptic Ben Hur, whipping the cab driver's bare back with her nursing bra. "FASTER! HYAH!" fearing her momwrath, my friend mysteriously vanished just as the taxi rounded the corner. miraculously she did not kill me, our upstairs neighbor, the super or any other innocent bystanders.

we ran upstairs and, miracle of miracles, the baby was still asleep! she stirred awake and mrs nice guy snatched her up. they nursed and bonded as i silently thanked the baby for not being covered in her own blood and vomit.

i am telling you, sometimes i don't think i am cut out for this fatherhood business. oh i have so many examples. how hard should this really be? i mean, the baby, she is not independently mobile yet! she can't crawl. she can roll over but never rolls more than once in the same direction; just flops back and forth in place. usually i can plop her on the bed or the rug with a couple of toys if i need to run out of the room for five seconds to grab something or answer the phone.

so the other day i did just that. she was sitting on the bed. i ran into the restroom to wash my hands or something. i wasn't gone for more than 30 seconds. when i came back into my boudoir, this is what i saw: the baby was still on the bed. but now she was on her back. and she had managed to reach a big pillow and pull it down over her face. her little legs were kicking like crazy. SHE WAS SUFFOCATING HERSELF! jesus!

look, i fully expect her at some point to roll off the bed accidentally or torment a cat until it claws off her ear. i never expected her to try to just off herself! but there it is: my baby has a deathwish! if i had lingered in front of the mirror with my handsome self as long as i usually do, she would have totally done herself in. "goodbye cruel world! not for me your mushy carrots and puffy little snow suits. remember me to mother ... " when i removed the pillow she had clutched to her face, she was flushed and panting.

and she looked like she had been having a good time! this is perhaps the most distressing part of all: i suspect she's a little thrill seeker. i mean, the easiest way to get her to giggle is to throw her waaay up in the air or to pretend to drop her or to attack her with a giant stuffed animal/monster or to just flat out scare the shit out of her ("BOO!") -- seven months old and already she likes the rough stuff. so help me god, it's going to kill me before it does her.

something for you to try at home

you know what i love to do? i love to go to the pharmacy with the baby in the bjorn ... and buy condoms.

from boob to nuts

cole odell at Mountain of Judgment (a smaller and less thoughtful blog than the one you are currently reading) recently served up this dandy post, filthy with genius, wherein he ponders his child's propensity to punch dad in the nuts.

what is it about kids that from the very crepuscular dawning of consciousness they are hellbent on inflicting violence upon their parents? is it darwinian? freudian? something i said? whatever it is, there's something terribly greco-tragic about the whole thing.

take for example our own child: she loves to pull your hair. on a number of occasions she has dug her fingernails, which grow at the speed of light squared, directly into my retina. the other day she reached into my mouth and managed to find a festering canker sore, which she dutifully clawed.

last night as she sat in her little bathtub, splishing and splashing, she grabbed the washcloth from me. she began rigorously sucking on the washcloth. then she bit down hard on the washcloth and slowly dragged it through her gritted teeth. then she did it again, scraped the hapless thing through her clenched fangs as if she were eating an artichoke or edamame. mrs nice guy turned to me and said: "LOOK! that's exactly what she does to my tits."

but wait, there's more. my wife's tender womanparts are not the only sensitive bits around here to receive the furious scorn of our spawn. she's a growing girl, our baby is. just like her old man, she's about 26 inches long now. she's also chock full of vim and vinegar. she shrieks, she flaps her arms, she kicks her legs. this last one is particularly dangerous. especially when the testicle-having half of the parental unit is wearing the bjorn. you see where i am going here: her legs, which are prone to spontaneous whirligigging, dangle to the exact spot on my body from whence she first swam into being as tadpole gamete.

occasionally when i am wearing her in the bjorn, i have to powder my nose -- hey, it's been known to happen. anyway, without fail i feel like i am playing miniature golf, trying to project a stream through the windmill of her kicking feet. but that's not the worst, as you can imagine. the worst is, to be blunt, when out of nowhere she delivers a swift roundhouse to my nuts. she does pirouettes on my scrotum. she uses my beanbag as a trampoline. usually i black out before the pain becomes too unbearable.

so there you have it. i was certainly expecting emotional abuse from my children. but i never would have guessed there would be such savage physical beatdowns. and she can't even walk yet!

needless to say, i am no longer as enthusiastic about the baby bjorn as i once was.

why holidays are so often high

it's cold here. dropped below freezing. what am i supposed to do all day long? what is one supposed to do when it's too cold to take your 7-month-old outdoors and you don't have cable and your external hard drive is dead so you have no more music and your computer is riddled with viruses so it accesses the interweb only at a geologic pace leaving you stranded and alone in your own home with a cranky baby in a not-very-heated apartment because the developer cut little corners like, oh, INSULATION and you have no friends and are therefore slowly going totally insane? WHAT DOES ONE DO?

the peak of the week so far was therefore dragging the baby from brooklyn to ass-nowhere upper east side. we went to see the hemangioma surgeon on monday. he is so fancy that he takes no insurance and therefore we paid him $300 to tell us what we already know: he could operate to remove the growth. or not. up to us. we could wait to see if it resolves on its own since it's responding well to laser treatment. or he could go in there and cut it out at 12 or 18 months. yes, well, thanks. we knew that. so i guess we'll revisit the issue at her first birthday party. if i live that long.

the baby turned seven months old officially on monday. lucky seven. she's sleeping through the night again; we've reached a detente in the Nap Wars. she's eating solids like a champ. she sits up. she has teeth on top and on bottom and, to her mother's delight, routinely mistakes nipples for bubble gum. she shows no interest in crawling, she wants to WALK.

we went to a little holiday party over the weekend hosted by some mom in mrs nice guy's neighborhood mom's group. to my unceasing astonishment, i find i truly relish going to kids' parties. they're more fun than parties attended solely by adults -- mostly because i hate my peers, enjoy children and love alcohol. so any occasion for sanctioned drinking with kiddies is high on my to-do list. happy holidays! my life is so tiny and pathetic now that when one of the moms remarked that our baby is hitting all her milestones earlier than the other babies i thought to myself DAMN STRAIGHT. SHE CAN KICK YOUR BABY'S ASS.

to know me is to know my musk!

i apologize for the lack of activity around here. our home computer has died. sadly. i miss it. all my music, gone. all the pictures of my baby, no more. but most of all, all my music. gone! mrs nice guy's office IT team has had our computer for the past week and they apparently have no alternative but to erase the whole thing and rebuild it from zero. i hate my life.

so you'll excuse me for not updating every 2 minutes. i am currently writing this on my darling bride's work laptop, which, i have been warned, will give my fingers a little 293 volt shock every time i type the word "cunt." ow! fuck! OUCH!

no news to report here. i will say this: mr nice guy has a new deodorant! before i tell you what it is, here's a little background: in high school i went through a Mr Natural phase wherein i used only deodorant that contained no aluminum, because i read somewhere that aluminum causes alzheimer's. seeing as how 31 flavors of dementia course through my DNA, i wanted be as proactive as possible in staving off senility. but the very fact that i could never remember where i read that fact about aluminum causing alzheimer's should have been clue number one that it was ALREADY TOO LATE.

anyway, look at the ingredients of your favorite deodorant: i will bet you my first born's left hand that it includes aluminum. apparently aluminum is the active ingredient in deodorant. don't believe me? try buying a brand that doesn't include aluminum. you'll smell like Hobo Jones McCrackhead in about three hours. how do i know this? because i wore deodorant without aluminum in it for YEARS! if my 30 year old self could talk to my 19 year old self, he would have a few things to say. for instance: lighten up, have a drink, easy with the blow dryer and BUY SOME REAL DEODORANT.

of course, it probably didn't help that i didn't shower all that often.

so fast forward to today, my inchoate 30s. now look here, mr nice guy has some ridiculously high levels of testosterone coursing through his system. he cannot help but emit a powerfully sensual musk. all the ladies want a slice of my pie. since those long-past dark and smelly days, i have been using aluminum-based deodorants. i may not shower every day, but you can be damn sure that my pits are perpetually plastered with a thick, crumbling chalky white residue. heavy on the aluminum. i have learned my lesson.

but to this day i have not found my brand. how do you men choose a deodorant? i feel like everyone i know was just born using whatever deodorant they use today. not me though. i need to find a brand: old spice is too old and spicy; right guard is too ninth grade locker roomy. one day i thought i had stumbled on one: SURE, outdoor fresh! and the tag line just oozed that sense of confidence i wanted: raise your hand if you're SURE! i wanted to be sure! bonus: it smelled good and it made me smell good! so i made a commitment. before long, i found that i no longer sweat great circular stains into my shirts' underarms. people would have conversations with me that lasted longer than 8 words. it was a perfect match!

and then. on the day before thanksgiving, i bought SURE, outdoor fresh scent, without realizing that i had purchased the "soft solid" version. just as we were preparing to leave for the airport, i grabbed the new deodorant and began applying it liberally to my stinkdips. before long i realized something was dreadfully wrong. this was not the SURE i knew and loved. the deodorant went on slimy and wet. it was slithery to the touch. not chalky at all! surely it was still the same SURE, right? pressed for time, i shrugged the new "soft solid" gimmick off to modernity and went on my trip.

somewhere around the third hour of our flight, i reached over my wife to grab something from my bag, just on the other side of her lap. an apple or something. i settled back into my seat, about to bite into the delicious honeycrisp when she looked at me. she leaned into me. since her headphones were on she did not realize i was perfectly able to hear her. so she scrunched up her nose and said at about 5007 decibels: DID YOU PUT ON ANY DEODORANT THIS MORNING?

suddenly the whole plane seemed interested to know the answer to this question. because, you see, the whole plane was, unlike my wife, not wearing headphones and had therefore HEARD this question. what could i say? YES, i had put on deodorant. but at the precise moment she asked the question, i realized that this newfangled slimy "soft solid" deodorant had utterly failed me. a peaty steam reminiscent of moss, mushrooms and meatloaf billowed forth from my torso. it smelled like a small rodent had died in my shirt. not so SURE after all, eh mr nice guy? more soft than solid, it would seem.

so the next morning i did what any sensible redblooded american male would do: i put on my wife's deodorant.

dudes. guys, MEN. let me tell you something: the women are hiding a wonderful thing from us! "ph balanced for a man but made for a woman," they say? PHOOEY! that's just code for "na na na-na na, you caaan't have this!" they're taunting us! look, women's underarms always smell good enough to eat. why can't we have it that way as well? men! listen to me, for i am the jackie robinson of armpits. why must we always give off the scent of boars in heat? i have been wearing my wife's deodorant every day since thanksgiving and you know what? the world has begun to look, well, different to me somehow. the sky is bluer, the birdsong is truer. i get whistled at by men on the street. there is magic everywhere! and i smell lovely! all the time! this is wonderful!

and, yeah, maybe it has a little aluminum in it. but you know what? dementia never smelled sweeter.

exile on my street

how is it possible that a six month old child can get bored? fine. she's almost seven months old now. almost. granted. but, still ... HOW IS IT THAT SHE GETS BORED? she hasn't been around long enough to get bored. everything should still be new to her! but, oh, people, she gets bored. man. if she does not enjoy the going entertainment of the moment she will let you know. she squirms. she wriggles and grunts. she does this thing with her spine where she becomes totally rigid and erect while somehow managing to become floppy as an overcooked noodle AT THE SAME TIME. how does she do it? floppy yet rigid! a mystery!

i know why she does it, though: she's bored. she tires of her multi-colored plastic chains. she is bored of the giant stuffed tiger. the exersaucer entertains her for a few minutes, tops, before its charms cease to seduce her. mind you, until the moment where she decides that the world is about to end if something (namely me) doesn't drastically alter her reality PRONTO, she is having the time of her life. a fucking blast. she smiles and shouts with glee. but then, with almost no warning, it all comes crashing to a halt. she pauses. her brow furrows almost imperceptibly. she stops smiling. she looks around the room, searching for the invisible demon which is apparently about to enter her being. she opens her mouth. and then she makes this sound:

EEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE

EEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

she wants me to know that she is bored! and it is too late. she has officially passed the point of no return: NOTHING i do will make her unbored.

cats? they'll do for a minute. the mirror?! sure, interesting enough ... for 34 seconds. a walk in the bjorn??!! only if you don't mind having a test of the emergency broadcast system strapped to your ribcage in public for 30 minutes. a nap? HA, FOOL!

this kid is, i have no choice but to conclude, an ADHD afflicted midget with a severe methamphetamine addiction. i swear, she's doing meth in her crib while she's supposed to be napping. HOW CAN ANYONE HAVE THIS MUCH UNSTOPPABLE ENERGY?!?! the reaching! the grabbing! the pulling! the needing!

i think i know what's going on: she desperately wants to move. she has no desire whatsoever to fucking sit still and enjoy her multi-textured board books which somehow manage to captivate her father for hours. (THAT'S not my puppy, her ears are too fluffy! feel the ears! feel how soft and soothing they are ... definitely too fluffy. definitely not my puppy. and yet ... everything is suddenly, well, GOOD when you caress those soft puppy ears. STROKE THEM!) she does not want to remain in one place. she does not want to sit quietly while you drink scotch at 11 am (hey, it's almost noon!) and look at dirty, dirty pitctures on your wife's computer. this baby has bigger plans for her day!

and yet! she shows absolutely no interest in crawling. no. she is much, much more intrigued by the prospect of slipping a beaten copy of On the Road into her back pocket and hitting the asphalt with her own private Neal Cassady -- she wants to cruise. she wants to ramble. she wants to jig and jog. she wants to move. mostly, she is very excited by the prospect of destroying my house. she wants to yank every motherlovin' book and picture frame and knicknack that isn't nailed down from the bottom shelves of all our book cases. she wants to to make life exceedingly difficult for a certain awkward, slow-moving, asthmatic galoot of a mr. nice guy. anything else would be just, well, boring. she wants to wreck this place like it was some classy hotel and she was the rolling stones on tour in 1975.

and you know what? i am confident that she will ... i have never been more confident of anything.

apropos of nothing

Wouldn't you cry if someone took away your bourbon and cut your cable line just as Desperate Housewives was about to commence?