Saving Money on Groceries!

In these tough economic times, everyone is trying to save money. People are turning off cable, Xbox live accounts, their llama grooming services–I've even put my butler on a two-day work week!

Death By Children knows you have little time to spend researching ways to save money–and that most of you are too young to remember a back-in-the-day before we had wireless phones, blackberries, inflatable tennis shoes, and Twitter. So to help you, I am doling out the benefit of my significant experience as a former poor person. Welcome to Saving Money from Death By Children.

How to Save Money on Groceries: Give Up Prepackaged Food!

After our mortgage, car payments, and cellphone bills, most families spend the most of their money on food. And by food I mean prepackaged crap. I know what you're saying already. You're already opening up a comment to say I DON'T BUY PREPACKAGED FOOD! I COOK FROM SCRATCH! You think you do but you don't. Most people have been using pre-packaged food for so long, they forgot what scratch is.

For instance: which of these is a prepackaged meal?

1. The Bell a' Doccio "Italian Supper," pack which includes pasta, sauce, herbs, garlic bread, grated romano cheese, and a tiny little bottle of olive oil.


2. Paul Newman Marinara sauce. And a box of pasta. And a loaf of bread.

If you said "1," you went to public school. If you said "2," you might've gone to Our Lady of Perpetual Hangnail, but you didn't pay attention. They're both prepackaged meals.

We're so used to tossing a couple of bottles of Prego in our cart, we're forgetting how incredibly easy it is to make simple red sauce. And it's cheap. And it takes about the same time to make simple red sauce as it does to heat up Paul Newman.

Cooking from Scratch Costs Less

I did the math. A store–bought taco dinner costs $9.69 for a family of four (that includes the onion, lettuce, garlic, and cheese.) A home made taco dinner costs $5.98 and feeds six. AND it tastes better. Over a year, you'd save more than 88 bucks a year making tacos on your own.

Of course, there are problems with this plan. For one thing, time is money and I didn't factor time into the math I did today (because it took me so much tiiiiiiiiime).  We're all freakishly busy these days and the maybe the 88 bucks we save over a year isn't worth the twelve hours of prepping it takes to cook from scratch. It took me seven and half years to make my own tortillas tonight then another fourteen hours to roll the little balls of flour into paper thin shapes that were really really nowhere near the shape of a tortilla which is probably Mexican for "you can't make these at home no matter how hard you try, idiot gringo."

And of course, I'd prepared the steak ahead of time because that's what you do when you're cooking from scratch. I bought flank steak that was on sale, because that's what you do when you're saving money, then I froze it and thawed it out tonight to put it into the super cool amorphous tortillas (which is now Mexican for 'looks like it fell on the floor then was mauled by a dog') with some cheap bulk shredded cheese then baked at 400 degrees until they're bubbling and all melty and look like huge poorly constructed models of human cells for a middle school science project that got a D-minus. Which is exactly how your kids will react to them. Right before they hurl.

My Eyes Burned Out by Boobs--Merry Christmas!

(Thanks, Miss Cellania!)

My daughter turns 14 in less than a month. She is distressingly beautiful and walks with a confidence and dominion I can barely get together even now at 42 years old. I can't imagine what it must be like to be almost 14 and have this kind of aplomb. I adore her and I will brag ad infinitum (ask anybody). But I'm having a hard time accepting that 14 is on the downhill side of little girl. This was made alarmingly clear this holiday season when my daughter asked for and received a really expensive dress. When I say really expensive dress, just think of it more like a fancy word for a traveling boob display case.

I'm not really an old fashioned dad. I can't be. I'm the mom. I do the dishes, manage the homework, cook the meals, clean the house, and drive. I quit my job in retail a while back so my wife could join the dark side (Darth Mama) as a patent attorney. I see her for all of eleven minutes a week. I am the quintessential soccer mom except that I'm a man and we do basketball.

Being a man means having habits and appreciations and thoughts that are significantly different from homemakers of olde. I, for instance, don't know squat about girls. Never have. Dating was a total disaster for me until I met my wife and she sat down with me and explained, once, why I was such an unmitigated butthead with women and if I ever wanted to see her naked, I should do a), b) and c) and never d) or e) again, and don't event think about the rest of the alphabet. God bless her. So my daughter has been a walking mystery my whole life and since she hit puberty (like a truck full of dynamite slamming into a BP) and received her mystical Woman-sight she realized I was just another stupid jerk boy and she pretty much quit worshipping me. I'm just a big fat hairy jerkwad now, only good for getting stuff off the higher shelves and charging her iPod. Opening my mouth elicits eye rolling so violent and powerful I fully expect her to need a neck brace.

But my lack of gurrl knowledge is a convenient blind spot for a lot of things, most of all the fact that they tend to turn into women which means that at some point they sprout boobs. Of course I knew this would happen. In fact, it's been happening since she pubernated but I rarely think about them, uh, it. In fact, my mind takes such elaborate routes to avoid the very concept of Daughter Boobs that it's like she's blurry between her waist and neck. I see nostrils and kneecaps--that's it.

On Christmas day my daughter got her dress and promptly put it on. She'd just gotten her first haircut in God knows how long, a haircut administered on the sly by a woman who runs a booth on Michigan ave for a well known department store so hoity it's name can't properly be pronounced without an ounce of black caviar in your mouth. Her hair was Jennifer Anniston good.

The dress I can only describe as a brown crinoline strapless poufy thing that must've required nanotechnology to get it on and looked like it was designed to invoke all the best parts of the 1944 academy awards banquet while simultaneously providing a level and architecturally sound platform for displaying my daughter's winnebagoes.

When I stumbled down the stairs and threw open the door, and my daughter turned to say good morning while wearing her new dress and whirling her Jennifer hair, I automatically submitted to the architecture of the dress and planted my eyes exactly where its engineers intended while simultaneously realizing "Those belong to my daughter," whereupon my eyeballs exploded and a little voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Charleton Heston's whispered: You, sir, disgust me.

I said Jesus, Sarah, put those away! And here's where things really got weird. My daughter was not only not embarrassed, she realized instantly that she wielded some kind of awesome power over me and instead of demurely tugging up the edge of her expensive haute coteur she loomed her boobs in my direction and said "look dad, booooooobs," and cackled gleefully as I covered my eyes. She cackled!

Although, by degrees, my sight is returning, I have to say: my eyes were opened. I finally get that my daughter, though only 14, is pretty-much grown. More importantly, I have had to take an objective, neautral look at her and accept that she's not only grown, she's drop dead beautiful, smarter than most of the adults I know, highly confident, and working on a kind of wisdom you don't expect from an eighth grader. She's the kind of girl that makes boys run into things and while they are addled and trying get upright she has the capacity and, I bet, the will to talk them into just about anything she wants from moving furniture to investing in bio-tech. Should she decide to follow in her mother's footsteps and go into Law, I have no doubt she will be like some kind of Greek-god force of nature and make ten bajillion dollars before she's 30.

And I suddenly realize what this means. It isn't just that she's sporting new equipment. It's bigger than that. She's coming into her own, assuming the mantle of her glamour, in a time when there are no restrictions on her gender. The fight has pretty much been won. And instead of the fugly hairylegged braless skanks men feared would come out of the ERA, we've got my daughter: super gorgeous highly educated and bristling with glamorous regard. I fear the poor bastards who get in her way.

13 New Countries Just Added to Epcot

1. Tursjikstan (fun to spell.)


2. Lithuania (actual size.)


3. Darfur (every 20 minutes a mechanical Bono sings "We Are The World".)


4. California (Move the Terminator ride here)


5. Cuba (So we can all smoke good cigars. Accessible only by raft.)


6. Russia (just a bunch of mean looking dudes in leather coats staring at you out the passenger window of a black Hummer.)


7. Wales (Teaching the English how to be English since 1103.)


8. St. Kitts & Nevis (because it would confuse the hell out of England.)


9. Cote d'lvoire (You need to have at least one Gay country.)


10. New Orleans (they have the best water ride.)


11. Djibouti (their dance club motto: Shake Your Booty in Djibouti!)


12. Belarus (Cause where else will the aliens go to land?)


13. Ireland (Like on Mission to Mars, you pick the green side or the orange side and one of them makes you throw up).

Birdwatching

I am 44 years old. Fourty four. It's an incredible thing to say, to have reached this level of maturity, this sanguine, sage, and wise perch on the dim side of middle age, and I truly wish I had some nugget of wisdom to reveal to you, my gentle, inebriated readers, but all I can say is that being 44 just means I've been 11 four times.

It's not my birthday. I just that I'm coming to the realization that I will never completely grow up.

I tell my kids all the time that people don't all grow up in a straight line. I tell them that being adult is not the same as being mature. I tell them that most grown-ups are just nine-year olds with jobs. They believe it, because they've known me their whole lives.

I was thinking about this today and my son and I engaged in a little surreptitious bird watching.

A lot of people think birdwatching is for hopeless geeks or the British. But their thinking of the popular sport of spotting actual living feathered bipeds. I'm not talking about those birds, I'm talking about the finger variety.

I don't know what the hell drives me to do it. I mean, seriously, go on Facebook and look at my iRead bookshelf. I read about linguistic theory, guillouche construction, and history. I'm no idiot. I don't think I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm an idiot.

Is it possible for your inner child to be precocious?

So me and the Roon are in the eye doctor's office today and she's got her back to me and says "Ok, now look at your father," and while she gazes into his eyeball I start flipping the bird.

Where does it come from? What prompts this? I'm in the room with a dignified professional, someone to whom I'm paying a hefty bucket of coin, yet as soon as her back is turned I go tween, flipping the bird, and making my son laugh.

The doctor half jokingly asks, "Am I that funny?"

Now a normal adult would take this as a cue to drop the shenanigans. But I just amp it up so that she has to give the kid a second to cool out before she finishes the next eye.

If she had turned to look at me, it would have been one of those questioning looks often shot wordlessly between knowing adults as a kind of verification that they both consider the kid they're considering to be home schooled by drug-addled baboons. She would have seen a middle aged man with a grim, serious, no-bull-dooky look on his face. The kind of face that keeps me from getting mugged. The kind of face that scares pre-schoolers and dogs.

Unless she checks the security cameras, she'll never know that this seemingly grumpy father was practically mooning his son while her back was turned. She'll never see me mock vomiting, or pretending to eat my boogers with the melodramatic trance-like gustatorial delight of a Rip Taylor gourmand. She will always think my son was laughing at her.

And that's part of the joke, this secret stand-up routine that goes on forever between me my spawn; that it's just between us, a sacred covenant of comedy, a language of fart jokes, family guy references, and guerrilla wet willies that only we can partake of or comprehend.

And I'm OK with it. People make assumptions about me. I wear a nice suit, comb my hair, know my way around a three course dinner, and can list the differences between a Malbec and a Pinotage until everyone's eyes glaze over. But if my kids are in sight, somewhere in the conversation I'm having with the adults, I'll recognize a moment when no one is looking at me and I'll catch my kids' eye and I'll use my middle finger to push up my glasses. Or I'll say something like 'there's only one thing I can  say about . . . ' and use my middle finger to count. Or I'll tap the top of a glass with my middle finger while I'm looking at them and they'll howl in the back ground, absolutely entertained by the sheer purposeful bravado of my depraved immaturity.

Is it professional adult behavior? Is it even worthy and admirable? Is it the kind of behavior you should manifest for your progeny? Blowhard says what?

Hell if I know. No parent truly knows what works. For me, it's a combination of calculated neglect, abject clarity, and unmitigated honesty. I try not to ever pretend to them, to ever act as if I have all the answers or even the final say. And I haven't told them this part: that half the time I'm flying by the seat of my pants, figuring it out as I go and, most terrifying, I just as often base my parenting on what I learn from them. That's not a Hallmark platitude, either: my kids are frikkin smart. Most of all I'm not restrained around them. I allow my inner retard to go wild, to let my monkey brain take over, and to flip the bird in secret as often as I can. I think it teaches them that growing up doesn't mean you abandon childishness. It means you celebrate it. I think that works.

That and fart jokes.

I am Pee Triumphant!

When the boy was little, I used to tickle him constantly. I'd just go to town on him because he laughed so loud and giggled so hard that I'd crack up.

Unfortunately, what made me crack up made him crack up and at least once a day I'd send him into puke inducing giggle fits.

I should have recognized this as a morbid harbinger of things to come but I didn't really think much of it.

I love making my kids laugh. Almost as much as I love to threaten them with instant maiming if they so much as breathe heavy during 30 Rock. They pretty much live a life ping-ponging between uncontrollable laughter and panic stricken terror. In fact, I have total control over their funny bones and can make them laugh even when they are move-away-and-change-their-name mad at me.

The other night at dinner I had them going at dinner so hard [My Attorney] had dialed 9 1 and had her finger poised thinking they were going to choke. I've made them go boneless with mirth. The first time it happened to Roon he sagged to the ground in a spineless heap and I had to shovel him into the minivan.

But the kid's twelve. I thought the boneless pee pee days were really behind me but this week I scored big. Before the kid went to school, I made him laugh so hard he hosed his highwaters. And instead of being embarrassed, this just made him laugh more which led to, um, further liquidity.

I'm not proud of making . . . my son, um . . .

Who am I kidding. They should give awards for this. Man, if you can make your kids laugh so hard they pee when they're TWELVE you're practically a Jedi.

I found this out when I was driving a car full of scouts home from summer camp. Four hour drive that finishes in Chicago so here's what happens. You get half way home, stop at Taco Bell and eat until your ribs hurt because you've been eating nothing but gruel and bugs and suddenly someone offers you UNLIMITED beef meximelts and eight gallons of Mountain Dew, all of it consumed in a lip-smacking, growling, teeth baring melee that lasts just as long as it takes to skid to a stop into the back end of 5 o'clock traffic nine miles from home.

At this point, their bladders are Hindenburgs. And I start telling jokes. Stupid jokes. Dumb jokes. Repetitious, idiotic, scatological, pee pee, poo poo, buttcentric, crap that would make the 3 Stooges look like Rhodes scholars. And they're screaming, pleading, begging me to shut up. They were laughing through tears of rage. I actually thought they were going to foul the car.

I wish I could do this to adults, use my Jedi joke powers to make them piss themselves. Sure would make WalMart fun.

My Son Loves to Read

This is so important to me. I think mostly because I'm a writer and it's kind of nice to see him learn this important art that's so important to my art. He's staying up late reading and twice TWICE I've caught him killing the video game and kicking back with a book. There might be a God . . .

All in all, there is a change-a-comin' for the kid. I can see it in the way he pays attention to the world, the way he's picking up on the power and grace of good rock and roll, and the way he is disappearing into books.

I can't remember when I started reading. I think I was annotating Tolstoy in the womb. I have always been reading. In fact, it is safe to say I have been reading every day since I learned how. I should get paid for it.

I'm one of those crazy (gifted) readers who needs several titles at once. Librarians either love me or hate me. The really cool ones get this look in their eyes when I walk up to the counter with 14 books. Others see me coming with an 85 pound backpack full of books and they go on break.

Worse, I have multiple libraries. The upstairs loo usually has a stack on the sink; there's always a Harpers and a book in the car; the kitchen counter usually has a cookbook on the counter; there's a stack on my bedstand; a row on my desk; a literal library along the upstairs hall; then there's the stack on the end table by my chair in the living room. I don't know if my collection of rare books in PDF form on my hard drive counts, but they're there too.

Reading is an acti of magic as powerful as writing any day of the week. More importantly, reading is seperate from writing. They are intimately related but not the same. Both are creative acts (hence, magic). A person who is reading a book is working as hard as the writer to create a world and that world is distinct from the one laid down on those pages by the author.

The art of disappearing into a book is one developed over time though the trick of it can be learned in the blink of an eye, in the turn of a phrase. It's that moment in a story when you forget that your're reading a book and become part of the story, the invisible observer, the ghost in the room. That's what we are as readers, ghosts in the stories we love.

Maybe that's a great Halloween concept, something to scare you and make you worry a little. Think about the powerful sense that these characters in your favorite stories are alive. When you're reading it, you don't question it at all. They breathe, they love, they kill, they worry, weep, and waylay. And it doesn't end when you put the book down. You can return it to the library and forget about the thing, the sheaf of leaves you were studying so long, you can pretend it wasn't a talisman that evoked these characters into your head where they now live. You can believe they are all just a trick. But they're still there in your head.

What if the book doesn't evoke the characters out of the page, like a zip file, but instead invokes you into their world? What if we're the book?

Happy halloween.

I bet we're related!

For everyone who has a story of their kid sticking a fork in th garbage disposal, sticking a slice of bologna into the DVD drive, or getting lock in the running car, I present your one-uppance:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Christmas Tree for Indie Bands and Drunks

hen my Attorney and I first met, we quickly moved in together in a run down flea bitten apartment in Orlando that was in the process of being condemned. It was a long apartment, open all the way through, with a Murphy bed in the living room wall and a row of derelict garage apartments across the back lot.

It was surrounded by palm trees and rhododendrons and the garage apartments were populated by drunks and the semi-homeless. The neighborhood was surprisingly Bohemian and our street ran along Lake Eola to dead-end against an office building a block north of the Library. A passel of raccoons lived under our apartment and we were plagued by fleas. We had the oldest refrigerator in the world, a waterbed, and a couple of middle aged queens for neighbors in the adjoining apartment. We shared a common porch, festooned with wildly healthy plants on their side and a growing pile of newspapers on ours. Didn't matter. We were in love.

So around Christmas we decide to have a party. My Attorney didn't know a soul in town except her brother but I knew everybody and I invited them over for a party.

My Attorney hails from a semi-privileged existence in Chicago and has not always been privy to the ways and weirdnesses of poverty stricken musicians and writers which comprised 100 percent of my peer group and found herself a bit startled when, instead of eating the carefully arranged snack try, they began to surreptitiously throw tomato slices and salami cuts around the room when she wasn't looking. Worse, she had gotten a whole box of Andy's Mints from the office. Now, in the 50s, in Florida, light green was a very popular color, eclipsed only by Avocado 20 years later and our walls happened to have not been painted since 1953 and were the exact color of the green side of and Andy's Mint. As soon as the drunken artists discovered this, they began to lick the chocolate side and stick them to the walls. We couldn't see them and continued to find them, about once a week, until we were evicted (by the health department) a month or so later. These same apartments are now high priced condos going for something like 400 grand.

There was a huge tube of cookie dough on the counter because my Attorney was going to make cookies and got distracted and someone grabbed it and was passing it around until someone else discovered her cache of rubber gloves (my Attorney was then My Scientist). They immediately filled a glove with dough, shaped it like it was giving the bird, and stuck it in the freezer.

Around this time, a group of girls from my office and the acting girlfriends of my friend's band abducted my Attorney to go away from the stupid people at the party and buy booze. So for a while, my Attorney's guiding presence was not available and I lost control.

Losing control seemed to be a personality trait that came with the apartment for any worthy renter. I recall one night returning to our tropical abode in my super cool 66 Chevy Impala ragtop, to find a man lying face up in the middle of the drive. Now these garage apartments I mentioned had balconies facing the rear of our place and directly over this barely conscious man was the fixed quantity, always there in the evening when I was off to the newspaper, always screaming drunk, always with different homeless people, and always bellowing about something. This night, he had lost control par usuum and was reeling in his apartment, just the top of his head visible through the battered balcony doors, a hand with a bottle if Maddog occasionally popping into view, screaming, "Where's Reuben? I gave him my G*****M Army money to buy some likker ain't come back! REEUUUUUBEN!" Every time he'd yell Reuben, the guy on the ground would groan. I told Colleen to run in and call 911 but the guy managed to croak 'no cops'. I called the Fire Department instead.

Fixed Quantity's son came by for a week. There was a winner. He screamed even louder and evidently drank far more than his father and scared the crap out of us, pounding up onto our porch and screaming about the "queers" and the "lovebirds" and calling us all out. I had my hand firmly gripped on a claw hammer next to the waterbed just in case he decided to come in for a visit.

This was the delicious and colorful world my Attorney was weathering up until the Christmas party whereupon, I believe, she made the firm decision to vacate post haste and relodge us in more appropriate digs. Some place with a pool, less drunks, and cable.

My buddy Sab (Mark Sabatino--where are you?) who is by far one of the most generous and gracious humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, was also one of the funniest people I ever met and decided that since our party was happening sop close to Christmas, needed a tree. So he took a chair from our assemblage of bad chairs, drug it out into the lawn, stole some Christmas lights from the neighbors, and wrapped the chair in them. Somehow, this caught on and there was a clamoring rush to find things to "decorate" the tree with, ending up with a dead houseplant and our cake. My attorney happened to pull up with her abductors about the time Sab ignited the handful of Black Cats he'd stuck in the cake and she witnessed with growing horror the redecoration of our small yard with cake residue and plant matter. The Christmas lights and chair were unharmed.

She came into the house to find me sunk into a chair, a bug satisfied smile on my face, a bottle of wine in either hand, and a screaming mob of people dancing in the living room, throwing Andy's Mints and sandwich meat onto our ceiling. To my Attorney's great credit, she cracked up and dropped into my lap. I don't remember what else happened that night, except that I managed to slur "mehrchrim muss" into her ear before everything went black.

It Has Discovered Rock & Roll Snobbery

I'm trying to work and the manchild explodes through the front door bouncing up and down like a pile driver and says "Dude, you gotta download Black Dog and Paradise City! They're like my favorite songs! What you don't know Black Dog?" it makes a derisive snort. "Jeez, didn't you used to run a record store? They're my favorite band I love that band gunsnrosesnledzeppelin ilovethatbandilove--"

I have to say I've had Led Zepp on the brain since I heard them on Pandora after years and years of strenuously avoiding them like the freakin' plague. All those bands from my very very early youth, the days before I could drive, before I could even ride a full sized ten-speed, way back when, the day whereof you speak when you say back in the day. That time. I loved those bands then. I liked the Doors and Led Zepp and Diamond Dogs from Bowie. I was into it. But after three hundred years of listening to the Doors played by tired old afternoon drive DJs I got sort of disgusted with it and started listening to jazz.

I still can't stomach the Doors but a deep and abiding love of Zepp has returned in full blossom. I just downloaded Houses of the Holy and yes I got black dog for my burgeoning head banger but I'm a little tried by his insistence that I'm a sad, disentigrating relic of musical taste and my love of bands like the Tin Hat Trio is blanched into oblivious white out in the stunning glare of his brilliant and pure love of Led Zeppelin.

But I'm not complaining, I'm just grumbling a little while I wait for his taste to to unfold fully enough to finally realize that my CD collection displays the burnished and weathered taste of an aficionado, a lifelong lover of music. I am encouraged by a couple of things.

a) Me. I have exquisite taste. Really, just check out my favorite Pandora station.

b) He takes drum lessons from one of the most talented heavy metal drummers in Chicago, a veteran of Chicago grindcore and math-metal bands all the way back to Ministry, a guy who can play 6/4 on the toms and 2/2 on the bass drum and not freak out. This guy has Roon play along to Clutch and the Talking Heads and is just a musical genius and having my kid in there getting an earful about the hypnotic effects of rhythm from this guy makes me fnorkin' joyous. And it means that by the time he gets it into his head to start a band and the other kids start to notice him, he'll have magnificent cred.

c) Him. He can swing from Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band swing jazz to Rob Zombie to Me First and the Gimme Gimmes doing Science Fiction Double Feature without skipping a beat.

d) He can do complicated math in his head. Nothing spells good tidings for musicians that a deep love for math.

Hopefully he'll break out and start a band and go platinum on iTunes and support me for the rest of his life. Hopefully he'll do that before he sneers at my music again because if not, I may just kill him.

Once again in the running for best writer on a girl's blog!

Please vote for me and my story, "Dances with Squirrels," by clicking the button on the left. I won one of these a while ago for one of my posts. I guess they still haven't figured out I'm not one of the girls . . .

DOWN WITH HOMEWORK!

So it's 10:30 at night and I'm driving to Kinkos to print out my daughter's social studies paper because our printer is, mysteriously, out of ink again. Like it's got a leak. I get to Kinkos and they're closed. So I have to call and find the 24 hour Kinkos where all the employees are failed dot com millionaires and screenwriters and perform their duties with the grim disaffection and terminal hatred you'd expect from vassal slaves and I'm thinking--this isn't life: it's survival.

When the hell is my daughter going to lie on her bed and daydream? When's she going to read something that's not assigned to her? When's she going to hang out on the stoop with her friends and shoot the $%!^? When am I?

Anyone with a new teen knows that this is the point in a child's development psychologists call the FU phase because pretty much that's the attitude a teen has and, for some of us, the words coming out of their mouths. Kids are beginning that slow burn into adulthood (for girls, that's 17; for guys, 37--maybe) and the key manifestation is the explosion of intellectual disdain for their poor retarded parents.

Sarah, for instance, proved this point last night when, at 9:45, still doing homework, she emailed a paper to me (she had to, I was on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE) and in proofing it I noticed she'd used the word WARE for wear. I called her on it and she made a face I'll never forget, a face that spoke volumes about the pain and frustration of bearing custody for a vegetable like myself. It was a cross between a resolute "duh" and "it'll be ok honey when they take you back in the home" and she rolled her eyes and said "Dad, you're a retard."

She adamantly argued that there is no such word as "wear" and that "ware" was correct.

Dad: "Use it in a sentence."
Sarah: "I'd like to ware my new dress but my dad is a retard."
Dad: "That's w-e-a-r."
Sarah: "Re. Tar. Dead."

My daughter is brilliant. She goes to Lincoln Park High School. It's been in NEWSWEEK. She scored in the 97th percentile on her ISATs. She's in double honors. For Christ's sake, our bumper sticker, "My child is measurably more intelligent that yours and, thus, attends LPHS. Booyah!" is in latin!

I blame homework. There's just too much of it. She has no time to read and when she does, it's Japanese Manga like "Boys Over Flowers" which she adores that I finally looked at and, after burning them all, told her she can't read them because they are, apparently, gay porn. When's she going to read Nancy Drew And the Case of the Past Participle, or Elmore Leonard's classic western, Guns of the Wild Dipthong? How is she supposed to actually learn anything worth learning if all she's doing is hitting the points required to merely exceed the standard standardized learning standard?

I realized that my family life is manic. We carom through our day from 6 am till we crash at 11:30. We don't eat together, we don't retire to the parlor for tea and talk. We don't sit on the porch and occasionally say "Yup." We're in a runaway car.

The other night I was on the couch tweaking a website and I heard the dog barking. I knew my daughter was doing homework on the back porch (which, to be honest, probably is a parlor) so I sent her an instant message: let the dog out. The dog is 4 FEET from her crossing his legs at the back door and whining. She IMs her cousin who is in the basement to let the dog out then the cousin IMS ME TO TELL ME THE DOG NEEDS TO GO OUT. I looked down at the screen and thought--I actually thought this--my son needs a laptop so I can IM him to let the dog out!

All of which would be instantly better without homework. If the kids came home and could just jet out and play (or in my daughter's case, preen), and If I didn't have to task-master biology experiments or rush to the library to check out books on Greek Mythology while they finished their algebra, we could all sit around the dinner table to a home cooked meal and talk about real stuff (in my daughter's case, preening) and just be together.

But don't take my word for it. Read this book: The Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett. I spent the morning talking to her in prep for the radio show and her argument is not merely compelling: it's what we're all griping about every night. Teachers assign homework without truly considering what they're doing. Why do first graders have homework at all? Why do teachers assign ridiculously complex diorama projects? I got home an assignment from my son's teacher a few years ago that was a coloring book page. I said "I don't spend [amount not disclosed] $%^ing dollars a year so he can distinguish brown from burnt sienna! Bennett's book makes an elegant case against homework. Some interesting points:

• Psychologists have expressed concerns about the amount of free time kids enjoy--33% less than 20 years ago and, on average, a half hour a day or less.
• Eating meals together as a family is better at building enthusiastic, confident students than homework.
• In her research, including calls to Harvard, Bennett could find no educational program that taught teachers how to develop effective homework assignments. No teacher that she talked to had ever studied homework.

You can find the book on Amazon or visit Bennett's website, Stop Homework. You can also visit my radio show website after the weekend and listen to what I promise will be a lively conversation.

In the meantime, I need you to write 500 words, in Latin, in the efficacy of using the word efficacy.

I'm Ready For My Close-up

esterday, I got a wild hair and got a psycho-killer haircut.

The time between my haircuts varies according to some kind of hippy zodiac alignment of the planets I remain blissfully unaware of. I don’t have a regular appointment. I don’t have a barber. I go to the Hair Cuttery over on Milwaukee where the person cutting my hair is a stout Polish woman who looks like she might milk a cow by throwing it over her shoulder so it doesn’t interfere with her plowing. Somehow she always manages to make me look less like Elton John than Steven King and for that I am marginally grateful.

Truly, I think the stimulus for scobbing my noggin is when my bangs start stabbing me in the eyes. Then I know it’s time.

And I always struggle there for a second to explain to Ms. Donstrykwytshdnski that I want a cut that is relatively corporate yet carries a sheen of the insouciant bohemian so I can go to a office meeting in a suit yet still stand out clearly as the writer in the room to which she responds “So, shorter, djah?”

In between these visits to the Balkan Barbers my hair grows like some kind of nuclear infused roadside weed, like Kudzu, until it’s grown into an exact replica of the contour of my skull and I have to spend an inordinate and insufferable three to four minutes every time I want to go somewhere applying various pomades and chemical mudpacks to make it stay in the cool pre-mullet halcyon day style I am accustomed to. This sometimes amounts to—brace yourselves—work, to which I am allergic.

So on the occasion, like once every ten years, I get a wild hair up my blog and get a haircut like I have now, a cross between a mental patient and a 1950s history teacher. Give me a short sleeved white shirt and a skinny black tie and
I’m a street preacher. Jesus loafs you, man.

And my kids have given no end of merciless hell for it. My daughter just flat out called me ugly and my son said it makes my gay glasses look good. My wife’s friend, my adopted Sicilian sister, Annabobannadanna, actually sighed and put her hand to her mouth, whispered something in Sicilian then blurted out, “Oh, Chris, what did you do?”

Thank god my hair grows fast. Almost as fast as my eyebrows so with a little coaxing and maybe some mustache wax I can get the Leonard Nemoy eyebrows to reach up and lock their fingers with the earliest scraps of bangs which might eke themselves out of my head like spring tulips.

So, gird your loins and shoe the children and the weak of heart into the basement and scroll down. You have my permission to replicate this in rubber for a Halloween mask.

The Full Montessori

hen Darth and I found ourselves parents, we threw ourselves into it with the customary zeal we apply to all our endeavors. We were in it to win it. So when it came time to put Sarah into some kind of school, we wanted it to be something where she learns. We expected her to come home speaking Sanskrit and levitating the dog. We wanted her to know the table settings in nine different cultural wedding banquets. We wanted her to curse in French, bitch about Descartes, and draw Leibniz diagrams in the spilled milk from her cheerios. Our daughter was clearly a genius and nothing in the Orlando environs really measured up. We combed the locals and the yellow pages and then we discovered, right across the road from us, a Montessori school.

MONtesSORi. We gazed upon it in mute stupefaction, like first-time toddlers just inside the gates of Disneyland. We practically drooled. Not only was there a MON te SOR ee school in our neighborhood--we could afford it. It was like the Hummer version of a daycare. Intimidating, overbearing, ridiculous and far fucking more than anyone needed ever, and whenever we parked our little SUVbaby next to other kids all we had to do was mention that she was in MONteSORri and they shut the hell up. It was stainless-steel-riveted modern parental class distinction. Just what our baby needed.

So we packed up our little darling and enrolled her. With Nazis.

I had reservations the first day. The paperwork they sent home had more misspellings than a ransom note. If you wanted to watch your child in class, you couldn't actually go inside. You had to look in through a video monitor. You couldn't even look in through a window. But I dropped my reservations the instant I saw one of my old editors walking across the parking lot. He parked his SUV, got out in a suit, and walked his kid into the back door of the place. He saw me and I could actually see his opinion about me change. He'd last known me when I was a mere copy boy submitting a few club reviews. Now here I was, a father, and my kid was going to rub shoulders with his kid at MONteSORri. Clearly I was blue-blazer material.

My reservations returned full force a few days later when the school called me in. My daughter was causing a scene, apparently she needed to spend a lot of time in the 'quiet time' area. This didn't seem like a big deal to me. The chick was three years old and though I really did want the est for her and yeah yeah yeah I wanted her to learn languages and higher math and all that bull hockey, I wasn't an idiot. A kid who wants to chill out at three is not a cause for alarm but here I was having a sit down with the school superintendent and the teacher. I asked them why it was such a big deal and the teacher, a woman barely into her low 20s, gave me a micro lecture about Sarah's group integration dynamics and some other crap I missed because my eyes glazed over.

I somehow managed not to kill this woman and said I'd see what I could do. I asked if I could look in on the classrooms and they explained the video porthole system and I gritted my teeth and went home and kicked a doorjamb and told my wife.

So my mother in law who, though she is 22-cats crazy, is a highly practical woman in all other regards, went for me as I had to work. She reported that the teacher operated as if there was some kind of invisible shield between her and the children. My motherinlaw was spittin' pissed and indignant and called them a bunch of Nazis. She said that while she watched, the teacher almost never spoke to the children and never, ever touched them, much less gave any of them a hug. Before I could even roll my eyes the phone rang. I needed to come to the school immediately--Sarah had caused a disruption.

So there I am again, my daughter in another room clearly bleary eyed from crying, and me with the teacher and the dominatrix of the joint at a tiny table. They explain that Sarah had refused to go outside for her morning exercise and that when pressed, she had stripped naked and lain spread eagle, face down, on the floor and screamed. I'm looking at the two women who are telling me this without a trace of humor without a flicker of a grin and I'm thinking my daughter, three years old and prone to nudity, has their number.

The teacher rubs her head with both hands like she's been up for thirty-six hours or something and says 'this is getting difficult. I don't know what to do.' I look at this poor, wan, exhausted women and think the room must be teeming with children and she's just overwhelmed and I ask her how many kids she has and she says seven. Like it's Dikensonian. Like she should get a medal. Like she's embattled. I stand up and ask for my daughter. I tell her she ought to go try working at a real school where teachers have upwards of 40 kids in a class. I tell her she ought to be ashamed of herself for having only 7 kids and not being able to handle it and I tell her she ought to try hugs for a control method. Then I called them Nazis.

I found a different place for my daughter, a catholic school daycare, where she was embraced, quite literally, by a cute woman named Betty who was running a rambunctious class of 15 kids all by her lonesome. They were all smiling and running around and having a good time. The place smelled like a school. They told me I could walk right in any time. And the entire time she was there, Sarah never stripped naked.

Training Video for Death By Children, Inc.

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo.

Out Pickled by Koolickles

One of my readers, Anonymous (who shall remain unnamed. . . ) posted this and I have to say, it's way weirder than my pickle pops. This is a Koolickle: a dill pickle, pickled in a gallon jug of red koolaid. Apparently, it's huge in the delta--where all good food comes from--so you know it's good!

Hey . . . what if you froze that thing?

I Am a radio Superstar!

Please visit Perfectly Harmless Radio to hear me and Dave screw up our radio show. Be aware the sound files are LOUD! Adjust your volume PRIOR to listening to them. We'll get better at it, I swear.

How to Pack for Disney

Listen, going to Walt Disney World is like voluntarily attending the Batan Death march. Pack light and prepare for blisters with sisters. Your feet will feel like they'd been hacked off and run over by a truck. Twice.

The average visitor to Disney walks 5 to 7 miles a day. The average visitor stands in line for about three years per ride (less popular rides only take about six months of standing). So figure that an average day at Disney is like hiking uphill barefoot over broken Coke bottles and hot melted plastic carrying your entire family and their respective souvenir lead figurines and signature bricks while a British guy keeps saying "Oy! Mate!" into his cell phone which you can barely hear over his skin as it audibly blisters--for eight years.

There was a point where I just wanted to saw off my legs and turn them in.

I realized that I really needed a handy guide, a quick, bulleted list that I could have used to help me navigate the horizontal Everest that is a day at Walt Disney World.

The Most Important Pre Disney Visit Preparation List In the World!

Pack The Following Indispensable Items:

1. A gas mask: Look, there's usually 17 million people walking around that place, people that spend most of their life eating cheese and beans and carbonated beverages while watching TV or surfing midget-wrestler porn. Suddenly they're walking the length and breadth of WDW in the hot sun and all the occulted gaseous deposits they've been storing up like secret Turkmenistanian nukes is getting dislodged and launched aft, directly across your bow and under your nose. Walking through Disney is like being haunted by an invisible  nose level stratus of ass fog. Every other breath I was punched in the mouth by farts from all over the world. It was EPCOT for ipicac.


2. Corn Starch: If your family is super athletic and skinny you may not need this. But if your family is like everyone else's and at least one or more of you have thighs like hickory trunks, then pack the damn starch. After just a mile or two of trudging up and down the horizontal mountain that is WDW, your average fat kid's inner thighs are gonna look like bright red boxing gloves and they will be walking with the wide open swagger of a gay cowboy. And crying. Keep it in a film canister. Apply liberally throughout the day.


3. Chewing gum: I have kids and they never shut up. At home, I just erupt once an hour and scare the living shit out of them and they simmer down. But I don't want to ruin a Disney trip. Shut them up by gluing their lips together with a big wad of gum. Disney doesn't sell gum because they don't want it getting on people's feet. Bring your own, shut their holes, and prevent yourself from going crazy.


4. Custom Translations: Because Disney is an international hot spot, you'll have the rare opportunity to get pissed off at people from all over the globe. Be a more effective communicator and translate your favorite FU lines into French, Norwegian, and Tajikistan. Here's mine:
   "Excuse me, you cretinous buffoon, but I actually require the tiny space in front of me for breathing so I was wondering if you could remove your unsoaped self from it post haste. Thank you."
   Excusez-moi, vous cretinous bouffon, mais j'ai vraiment besoin de le petit espace en face de moi pour respirer tellement je me demandais si vous pouviez supprimer l'autonomie de votre sans savon il vite. Merci.
   "No, that's actually MY foot. You're supposed to use YOUR feet for walking."
   Hindi, na talagang AKING paa. Ikaw ay para gamitin IYONG paa para sa paglakad.
   "For the last time, I don't work here, I just like to dress like a Pirate some times!"
   Pela última vez, eu não trabalho aqui, eu só quero vestido como um pirata algumas vezes!
   
   
   
   


5. The McCauly Culkin: You're going to get into one of those crowd clogs and wish you had a people plunger to flush everyone through the bathroom passage between Adventureland and Frontierland. Nothing works like McCauly Culkin! Just point over everyone's head, slap your hands to your face a'la that kid from that one movie, and scream OH MY GOD, IT'S MICHAEL JACKSON! Suddenly you'll be standing all by yourself. You must be careful to employ the McCauly Culkin with great skill or you'll be trampled to death.


6. Corn Chowder: Sometimes you just need your space and at Dismal World, you're not going to get any. People are wedged into that place like refugees on a raft. So pack a tiny can of corn chowder. If things get weird, if you find yourself sardined by smelly Norwegians and flotillas of twin baby buggies, just take a swig of chowder and let fly. Really spray it everywhere. Throw some theatrics into it. It's like a bomb--suddenly you have a 50 foot circle of privacy. If they don't get the message, reach down, grab a kernel off your shoe or something and eat it.


7. A White Cane: People all wink and grin and claim if you rent a wheelchair you can get ahead in lines. But wheelchairs are expensive and clunky and in order to sell it, somebody has to push. The truly savvy carry a foldable cane. You'll already have sunglasses so half your disguise is done! The cast at Disney is hip to the wheelchair trick and you most often end up waiting a long time while they let a few hundred people ahead of you to test your patience. They NEVER mess with the blind.  They'll even put a blind guy in front of the wheelchair people. Just remember the rides all have people watching on night-vision video cameras so be sure to Ray Charles yourself a little and point in random directions. At the end, wave at the wall.


8. Food: Disney food sucks. Imagine the least palatable cafeteria gloop you've ever eaten and degrade it enough so it could be used as a torture device at Gitmo and you almost have something disgusting enough for Disney cuisine. If you're bringing kids, then you've got built in pack mules. Clean out their school bags, pack one with food, one with ice and beer, and one with all your extra socks and gel insoles.


9. Extra feet: because you will finally collapse in front of the hat shop across from the Jungle Cruise and begin sawing off your own feet. Everyone does it. You think Disney made that cement brick red? That's dried blood, pilgrim.


10. A taser: sometimes you'll get stuck behind someone who just doesn't understand the urgency you feel in getting through the secret back way from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland and they're creeping along, two twin strollers side by side with grandma in the motorized scooter and nineteen kids walking in a line behind dad who is glued to his blackberry and no matter how hard you try, that narrow gap through their sedentary glurgefest it keeps closing up on you and you're about to 'splode. A deft application of 30,000 volts will usually stop them in their tracks and you can squeeze past them while they try to ressussitate grandma.

I'm Big in Japan

To my adoring fans in Japan, thank you, thank you so much. I can't tell you what this means to me. Actually, I just can't tell you what this means:

このサイトはこれから先、日本中が知る事になるでしょう。なぜならココは必ず会えて、無料で、サクラも確認できません！！
その３点が揃っていて知れ渡らないほうが驚きです。強制ではありません。
興味がないなら削除して頂いて結構です。ただ興味を持った方は満足して頂くと思います

(translated)

This sight becomes that the tip and in Japan know from now on, probably will be. Because as for the coconut being able to meet, being free, be sure not to be able to verify either the cherry tree!! The 3 points having been even, knows the one which does not cross over is the surprise. It is not forcing. If there is no interest, you deleting, it is good. As for the method which simply had interest the ♪ ↓ which you think that you are satisfied

Konichiwa, baby!