Empty Nest Envy Syndrome

Wait, wasn't I supposed to be sipping a demitasse at a Paris cafe this morning?

I checked my schedule and, indeed, my children were supposed to be gone already. Well, one of them. The other one is never here anyway so it doesn't matter. But the 20 year old? She's still sleeping in her room which, in French, is pronounced My Office.

But she has a job and she's going to go to school. I think. She said she was. I'm not sure which school she's going to. Maybe she's going to the school of sleep-all-day-go-out-all night and wear that one dress that makes me want to drape a blanket over her.

I willingly gave up my hip years to raise kids. I could've been a slightly bearded wordsman waiting tables in a boutique pork shop while spending all night smoking Gitanes, drinking coffee, writing 700 page oubliettes while never using the letter e.  But no, I was hip deep in dirty laundry, spent Pampers, and old pizza boxes. Instead of chilling out to jazz in Prague, I was learning all the words to the Sponge Bob theme song.

Which is all fine, because of the unspoken contract between I and my progeny in which, pursuant to page 89, paragraph 16, sub section MN, which states: "you will leapt from the premises as you turn 18 with a job in one hand and apartment keys in the other, forsooth."

Hasn't happened yet.

My friend's nest is empty as a Church on Saturday. He's renovated his daughter's room into a den and turned the other kid's room into a mancave. His empty nest is like a lair. He's currently teaching his dog how to open a beer.

 

My Dog Ate My Homework--Then Threw Up!

My daughter turns fifteen in a few days and I am compelled to make a few observations. I am finally getting to the point where her boobs don't scare me, where her astonishing compilation of sexual inuendi doesn't surprise me; and where her frank independence no longer challenges my authority and I am damn proud of myself.

But there is a trait that seems to have grown deep roots in the fecund habituae my daughter possesses and that trait is abject, terrifying, horrible absence of kempt. The girl's a slob. She exudes disarray, disorder, and disarrangement. She isn't, how do you say, sheveled.

She comes by it honestly--I am a reverse neatfreak. I'm obsessive-repulsive, I throw stuff everywhere. Well, ok, that's not entirely true. I love order. I relish organization. I get a contact high at the container store. If a house is organized and perfectly arranged I'm capable of pretty much keeping it that way. It's the putting it that way that I'm not up to and never have been. There's so much unfinished laundry in my basement that it's more like excavation than housework. I can pull it apart and read the history of our family as easily as a paleontologist reading lithics: the German Porn Bin-olithic era, the Pink and Purple pajama pant-o-zenic stage, the Osh Kosh B'Gosh-a-zoic. One day I'll break through the onesie-stratum and reach the floor.

But the girl child has taken it to a new height. Her habits aren't human, they're gull-like. She doesn't have a room. She lives in an impenetrable nest of unmatched bikini tops, iPod earbud wires, pantyhose, Pirates of the Caribbean pajamas, and yarn. Lots of yarn. I reached down to yank a lose strand of yarn out of the way yesterday and slung a hamster corpse across the room. This wattle is adorned like a crow's nest with spent Vitamin Water bottles, old glasses of orange juice, chip bags and Popsicle sticks.

This isn't so bad. I venture into her room trembling with fear, wary of boobytraps and micro-carnivores, stuff her underwear into her drawer and back out carefully. I keep the door closed. And just like the mom in Poltergeist, I will occasionally open it for curious strangers who will stare in wonder and fear then marvel at my indifference (not recognizing it as abject terror). As long as it's contained, I feel safe.

But last night, the unclean-teen's poltergeic puerility escaped and wreaked havoc on my living room.

As I have mentioned (bragged) in the past (five minutes) my daughter (monkey) attends Superhero High School, oft mentioned in a national magazine I'm too humble to name (Time) several (5) times. Her workload is college level and she often has homework questions I can't answer. Thank God her mom (rumored to be My Attorney [true]) is a superkillerfreakyEinstein genius with dominate genes or she'd be eating paste every day. Instead she's writng essays about Buddhism and Teen Pregnancy (that was a fun trip to the Library) and working calculus. This last weekend she crammed for her very first final exams ever. Her focus was like a powerful searchlight. You could see her thinking. It was like watching Jackie Chan outtakes, only for math. She studied for 17 hours straight and aced her exams. She earned a perfect score.
However, proud as I am, some reject teacher assigned a scrapbook project on the Greek Gods--all of them--showing the God, the origin of their name, and a well known product or object named after them. Two days before finals. That #@%@!

So I go to sleep and she's perched on the edge of the couch with scrapbook materials and her laptop, prim as a pea. I woke up to this:

The Great America Swine Flu Roller Coaster Heat Stroke Calamity, or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation!

The kids have had a busy summer. First I took them to Alabama for their ritual Summer sunburning and to taunt them with the richness and normality of family life in the rural South; then I throw the girl on a plane to a University level full immersion Arabic language course;

[caption id="attachment_1676" align="alignleft" width="240"] Six Flags. No, seriously.[/caption]

then I go to school for two weeks and leave the boy to starve to death while watching an endless loop of McDonald's commercials; then I pack his lazy ass off to a two week long computer camp at Lake Forest college where he stays over night in a killer dorm after spending the day with other geeks who understand AllCap, the geek Ur language, which sounds something like WTFD? STFU! NK! Beast headshot, dude, beast!; then he got swine flu and had to miss the second week AND lose 2400 bucks in the bargain and THEN after a week plus of ultra-laze video-game and dope induced bliss and recovery I send him to Great America on the hottest day in the Midwest in a year so he can ride roller coasters all day, blister his feet into some kind of cephalopodic skin graft gone wrong, get heat stroke, come home and fall down the stairs.

There are certain precautions most parents take when delivering their prepubescent children alone into the roaring maul of an amusement park. For instance, the parent will send the child with the following items:

1. Cell phone. Charged. Ringer on "taze"


2. Cash.


3. Water bottle. Do not confuse with Vodka Bottle, which is what adults bring.


4. The right clothes: sandals, light t shirt, hat, a bag with extra in case of drenching.


5. Hat.


6. Sun screen.


7. ID card pinned inside their shorts so if they fall off the ride, the authorities know where to send the body.

I sent my son to Great America on a day that would've made native Floridians shake their head with wonder as the humidity and the oppressive heat slaked their skin off their bones, in the following:

1. white socks


2. heavy tennis shoes


3. heavy shorts


4. a black t-shirt


5. no hat.

He had plenty of cash and was instructed to spend it mostly on water and Gatorade, instructions given by a parent who has forgotten that water in a theme park costs the gross GDP of Belarus.

He was instructed to call us at least three times and finally a few minutes before he leaves so we could swing by and pry his hyper excited carcass off the lot.

Call  1:

"I! just! rode! the! Eagle! in! the! front! car! I! rode! the! Raging! Bull! seven! times!!!! This!!! is!!! awesome!!!! OMG!!!!!!! AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [garble, garble]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   !   [ click].

Call 2:

[garble, garble; screaming] hands up but at the end!! I [garble, garble, garble, garble; music] huge wave hit me!!! [garble; click.]

Call 3:

You know the park closes in an hour, right? You have to leave now to come get us.

Call 4—29:

You heard what I said about coming to get us, right? Where are you? Should we run out to the highway? Can you see us? Can you see a McDonald's? Can you see McDonald's!

We get to the gate. Pull right up to the big WELCOME sign and the kid staggers out like a chunky prepubescent Frankenstein. He's holding his hands out from his sides and walking like he rode a sandpaper saddle all day. He's flushed and moist and squinting. I realize he looks exactly like I did when I was his age and did a six mile hike in Scouts along an open road in Florida in JULY and I realize the kid's in real pain.

We feed. We water. On the way home he tells us at one point during the day, he was dizzy, his heart was racing, and his mouth was dry. He starts to complain. He has a headache. His thighs hurt. His feet hurt. We get to his friend's house, drop the kid off, and my son starts to cry. He's moaning. We check him out, poke, prod. His head is hot and his hands are cold. We administer aspirin and Gatorade. He finally falls asleep in the back seat. We get home and he doesn't even want to go to his room. I make him a bed on the couch. We go upstairs.

An hour later, I hear a crash. Now crashes are not uncommon in our house and I always wait until the screaming starts before I react. 99 percent of the time, there's no screaming, so, no emergency and I can continue my Psych and Burn Notice marathon uninterrupted. Tonight, there were no screams, but a little while after the crash I heard whimpering. [My Attorney] and I leaped out of bed and found the kid slumped at the bottom of the stairs.

The poor kid, he was so exhausted, he kind of sleep walked and was going upstairs, god knows why, and laid his hand on my usual stack of magazines and books permanently perched on the third step and the whole thing tipped and he slid down. Didn't fall down the stairs; didn't flip over, hit his head, and paralyze himself down the stairs. But let me tell you, coming around the corner and seeing him puddled on the hardwood stopped my heart cold.

And it's all my fault. The kid had an absolutely fantastic day, except for the effects of bad parenting. To whit:

• I neglected to impart to my son the miraculously soothing quality of corn starch when applied to one's [insert preferred euphemism for one's "junk" here]. By the end of the day, you could've driven a clown car between his knees. He was walking like a retired cowboy.

• I dressed him like a retiree with bad circulation. I mean, seriously, the heavy lined shorts, socks, and a black t-shirt? We're lucky he didn't burst into flames.

It took him a while to get back to sleep. [My Attorney] performed her famous HIGH ENERGY LED FLASHLIGHT IN THE EYE CONCUSSION TEST wherein she uses a high intensity beam of pure radiation to cauterize the retina. I made him drink nearly a liter of Gatorade. He's fine.

I might not sleep all night, but he's fine.

This is how the world ends

If the world were ending on, say, Saturday, around 3:21 pm or so, would there be some kind of catastrophic leading indicators? And if so, would we be smart enough to notice? I'm only asking because, as your resident brainiac, I have to tell you, I'm seeing some pretty disturbing stuff out on the rough seas of the internet. In fact, I think I'm starting to see things, anomalies, virtual ghosts, bandwidth banshees. I'm seeing the kind of things you read about after the disaster happens and someones just happens to mention that all the dogs and cats ran away just before the volcano blew or 300 surfers mysteriously showed up the day before the tidal wave struck. Stuff like that.

The clearest leading indicator of our Apocalypse is the proliferation of Brit Lit. No, I don't mean all those Percy Bysh Shelley blogs. I mean literature regarding the imminent decline of Our Lady of Trailer Trash, Britney Spears.

This brief article will be the most attention I've ever given Spears during my adult life. She don't register. My mind is trained to edit my reality with excruciating prejudice. In th course of a day there are countless boneheaded micro-catastrophes it just blithely deletes. I never know they're there. It's like my inner child grew up to be a curmudgeonly aesthete and barely has the time of day for me much less the sheer billions of jaggoffs that walk among us, her calamitousness being one of them, being in fact, their queen. It's a gift from God.

But deep in the bowels of Death By Children's secret underground complex, the internet churns and wails and occasionally I have to go down and poke it with a fork and today when I poked it, it said "The end is near--Chart Britney's period."

We all know Spears went crazy when she married Kevin Federline. It's simple math: trailer trash + trailer trash = "Cops". And we're all guilty of paying attention to her mostly because we know she's bound to set herself on fire any day now and we want to be the first person in our Five to make the emergency conference "Dude" call and put the YouTube immolation video on our blog. Same reason we go to NASCAR. It's not the race that's exciting, it's the crash.

The thing is, Britney's crash is so inevitable that I can't see how it's interesting to anyone. In fact, I think her crash is long over but she's milking it. Or worse, it's all orchestrated by her Svengalian manager to drum up sympathy and support for a massive comeback to coincide with a new album and hit song. I don't know if it's better that I'm right about that or wrong. And I don't care that much. I'm just saying that she's one of the leading indicators of impending planetary destruction. She's THE indicator. In a bazillion years, they'll be referring to her and Nostradamus in the same breath.

How do I know? This is how I know. Celebrity gossip hounds have sunken pretty much as far as they can in finding Britnephalia to coat the empty insides of their blogs. It's not enough that she's just %$#@!ing crazy. That's not simple enough. And it's not enough that she's bipolar, or suffering from post-partum depression, or exhausted, or any of the ten thousand other afflictions that might explain the source of her ludicrous behavior (she makes Ludicris look like a Lutheran). NO, for the leading indicator of global deletion, Britney must suffer from something both noble and mundane, both ridiculous and rare, something divine yet disturbing.

She's on the rag.

But when Britney is visited by her leel frin it's she can't just be a little crabby. Her orc horde switches on her bipolarity, her post-partumality, and her panty-less-shopping-ism. Because she isn't human. She's a leading indicator and she dances on the upturned faces of her worshipful bloggists, people who watch her every move and would, could they afford the air fare, gleefully root through her garbage like feral pigs stumbling out of the forest into the grease trap at Arby's. People like this guy, who actually CHART HER PERIOD TO SEE WHEN SHE' GOING TO FREAK OUT NEXT! Gaze, as the planet teeters on the brink of disaster, on the wonder that i the menstrual cycle of Our Lady of Holy Sh--


(Red indicates . . . uh . . . that her "Cousin Red's" in town t help her with her "Grammar" . . . )

Dinner and a Booby

We run a tight ship around here at Casa de Death. No cussin. No runnin' with scissors. No mixing metaphors. Also, we're dead set against public nudity. This is not true of everyone in our neighborhood.

There's a fantastic Mexican/Guatemalan restaurant a couple of blocks away. We love it. Eat there all the time. In fact, we don't even call it by its actual name (because we'd get sued). We call it by the name of the exuberant owner. We call it Juan's. Some families order Chinese. We say, let's eat at Juan's. And so there we were the other night, peacefully crunching through some lomo de Res con nopalitos, chicken flautas, and steak quesadillas when I casually glance across the street and notice a light come on in a second story window. Oh, how nice, I think. I didn't know anyone lived over those nondescript businesses. Someone lives there. That's where they live. There.


I'm bringing a forkful of lomo and nopalitas (steak and baby cactus) to my mouth when the person who lives there steps into view and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt they not only live there, they also poop there.

Most bathroom windows are made from frosted or pebbled glass. Not this one. This one was carved from pure gas plasma high definition glass. As I stared, agog, through the remarkably clear possibly magnifying unfrosted pane, an elderly woman removed her robe and sat on what I could only assume was a pissoir and opened what I could only assume was a magazine (Exhibitionist Monthly?) I watched in horror, steak and baby cactus dangling before my gaping mouth, as she thrust out her chin the tiniest little bit and, I assume, strained, ever so slightly.

[My Attorney]: What?
Me: Man, these tacos are scrumptious.
[My Attorney]: (not fooled for a minute) What.
My son: Dad? Why do you look scared?
Me: How's your chicken oh my god!

The horror show across the street has gotten measurably worse. I will never be able to wipe it from my memory. As hard as I try now to wipe it from my mind, I cannot. I can't wipe that image clear. It remains there where I can't wipe it. Wipe. Wipe. Wipe.

Following my stricken countenance, [My Attoryney] and innocent child glance behind them and spit their flautas across the table. A flurry of Oh My Gods are whispered through fingers as we clamp our hands across our faces to wipe the horror from our horror wiped faces. Wipe.

Now we're trying to finish our meal without calling attention to the free show happening across the street. [My Attorney] is facing mostly away and the boy child, so innocent, so pure, has his back to the window. Well, his chair has its back to the window. My kid is practicing yoga so he can eat while accidentally glancing out the window into the window.

Our waiter stops by, follows our glance across the street into the red light district, and pours cold water all over the guacamole. He tries to clean up but he keeps staring at our new friend who is now standing and putting on a shower cap. She does some sort of . . . examination? We're not sure. All we know is the waiter poured water in the guac, the flautas, our empty margarita glasses, and onto the floor.

We figured she'd have to finish her ablutions and turn off the light but she did not. She continued to disappear and reappear, nekkid as all get out, as we finished our desert, politely refused to have our empty salsa cups refilled with coffee, and paid our check. She was doing some kind of pit maintenance as we drove away.

Two weeks later, we're at a neighborhood party and mention this, purely out of an altruistic effort to perhaps communicate to this woman that her glass, she is not frosted. We mention it because a person at the party works in the building beneath the glaze de l'boudoir and we felt we had to tell her. Turns out the woman is not entirely shy and may not give a rats ass if people can see her flaunting her flab over their flautas.

I guess we'll have to start requesting a table that faces the wall or perhaps only eat there in the daytime.

Alternate titles for this post:

"Rear Window"
"Room with a View"

The Joy of Shopping!

I took the boy child shopping today at the urging of [My Attorney] who saw there was a sale at Kohl's and insisted we go buy snow boots.

I don't hate shopping but I manshop which means I go in alone, unaided, unprotected, a solitary soldier with an objective and a deadline. I learned long ago that I have no real style so I stick with the classics and never deviate: white shirts, black or khaki pants, no prints, no visible branding, no logos. I know my size and I know where to go and I shop during the day when the pros are at work.

[My Attorney] can close her eyes and visualize any shirt as it would appear on the kids. It's her super power. If she were on Heroes she's defeat Silar by fitting him for winterwear for three hours until he caved and begged for mercy. She can buy a suit off the rack and it will fit me like it was tailored in Shanghai. She's like the terminator--only for clothes.

I am not. I had the actual boy with me today who actually tried on the clothes and stood in front of me wearing the actual shirt and we looked at each other and couldn't figure out if it fit or not.

"Is it too big?"

"I don't know."

"Is it too small?"

"Um, uh"

"Is it a small or a medium?"

"What?"

And the boy isn't exactly in it to win it. Here we are willing to drop a deuce on duds and he steps off the escalator, surveys the second floor and says "Everything here is gay."

Being that I end up in the stores with the moms most of the time, I have learned by carefully concealed observation how to find the stuff that appears to not be in stock. I've learned there is no such thing as sold out, that with enough arms-crossed-lethal-glare ground holding, one can make a befuddled stocking clerk hang by his nails in the rafters to look on top of the office roof and find a discarded pair of Totes Snowcaps size 8 that somehow got left there last winter and are now 80% off. I can do this.

Take today: Your average dad would take a quick look at the boxes stacked underneath the boots we wanted, see that they are all 9s and 11s and walk away satisfied that they don't stock 8s. I, however, am married to SHOPZILLA and, like a Spartan, I either come back with my sale item or draped across it, dead from multiple stab wounds. So I removed the entire wall of 9s and 11s, re-stacked them along the aisle, and lo, there in the back, were 8s and 14s. As soon as I had the pair I wanted, a herd of mothers spontaneously assembled behind me and bought everything I'd uncovered.

Using her super ninja shopzilla armor piercing sale-radar, [My Attorney] realized I had the boots in hand but was walking out before looking at shirts and pants so she called me and ordered me to drag the boy child through the shirts until something stuck.

We walked around the corner and he reminded me that 'everything here is gay' and I reminded him that people who say everything is gay are gay and he said I was working off some kind of repression and I mentally threw him down the up escalator. Physically, I made him try on mauve colored sweater vests until he realized I was just messing with him. Still, not one t-shirt made the bill excepting the "Chuck Norris" shirt which was too small. Everything else? Gay. He walked out with a belt buckle and a belt and a knit hat and a dapper gray button up.

In the parking lot, it was already snowing. The boy had elected not to put on his jacket because it was simply too much work. Now a mom would've busted his chops and made him suit up. But a dad is born with a sink-or-swim mentality that won't let us do that. I asked him once, he said no, I said fine. On the way in, it was still light out and he managed to just make it into the store before he shivered. But when we left? Black as night, falling snow, slight breeze and I had the keys. I made that trip across the parking lot in baby steps, talked on the phone, dropped my keys, asked him if he left his coat in the store. By the time I squelched the doors, he was blue and shivering.

"You cold?"

"Nope."

"People who say nope are gay."

"Shut up, dad."

"People who are cold are gay."

"SHUT UP!"

"People who say shut up are gay."

"Shut Up!"

"See."

Neal Patrick Harris is My Lord & Savior

It started in "Harold & Kumar Go To Whitecastle," when NPH played himself. I thought, wow, that guy is a total dilligaf. He's funny as all get out and dosn't take himself seriously. But his acting there was just him playing against type and being snarky.

In Dr. Horrible's Sing A Long Blog, he reaches some kind of Zenith of cool, with the help of Josh Whedon and some really great sidemen. When are the Coen brothers finally going to get it and cast Harris? This little movie is so good, so smart, and so funny. And watch NPH's nuances as the Mad Scientist/Blogger who's too shy to talk to his true love, Penny. Good lord this is the best thing on the web.

Dr. Horrible

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.