Sooo tired. These past weeks have been hell as z has been teething a lot. She usually wakes up at 2 in the morning and it takes at least an hour to get her back down until the Tylenol kicks in. She has such a low pain tolerance unlike m, whose like a little tank sometimes. On the plus of development, language continues to creep in. z can say the first half of words; (cheese is che) and m can say "ball" and "bubble" pretty clearly. Time to stop saying "fucking hell!" when near them.
Both kids have been acting a little "challenging" lately. They like to purposely walk over to somewhere I don't want them to be or do something that I don't like. But first, they look at you and check: "Is this going to piss you off?" If I look at them, that's when the bottle of poison goes in the mouth or they jump trough the stained glass window (did I mention I Live in a church that use to be a poison factory?) I thought that they wouldn't be acting like this until they were two. What happen to the terrible twos! I guess this is sorta a preview of the infamous teen years when they really lay on the spread. We have a whole room full of toys but they just want to climb up to the window, eat stuff off the carpet, climb over the guardrail or pet the rabid hyena, which is in their room for some reason. I know that if I ignore them, they'll eventually start doing stuff to get my attention; fast cars with boys/drugs/alcohol, yadda yadda... But perhaps I can circumvent their behavior by using reverse psychology. Make being good, naughty and they'll flock to it like sea gulls at a garbage dump. Maybe when they become surly teens, I'll leave porno magazines and drugs lying around and hide a bunch of textbooks in the attic and under my mattress: "Hey z! Look what I found! A Calculus book!" "Ooh! Check it a SAT prep kit."
When I was visiting my family across country, my big sister, C asked me if there was anything I was going to do differently with my girls than the way we were raised. I wasn’t sure if she was leading into a religious question or not. Like getting them confirmed into Catholicism. Unlike me, she still believes in the Catholic Church’s version of Christianity along with multiple Internet hoaxes. I have yet to convince her that Tommy Hilfiger is not a racist who wants to remove the words “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or Jesus will not get Bill Gates to give you money when ever you forward an e-mail. I told her the one thing I would NOT do would be to ever beat my kids. She looked at me as if my 10 years of living in Liberal Northern California had finally caught up with me. Like, Not only would I not beat my kids, but also I would let them have sex with their boyfriends in their rooms or smoke pot with us and call us by our first names. No, my objection to clobbering comes not so much from the couple of belt floggings by my dad but from the nuns at my grammar school. May those nuns all rot in hell. Yes, hell. I mean what kind of adult beats a child with a cane? This was the result of some kid opening the door to the classroom right when the girls were undressing for gym. For some reason, the boys would get dressed in the bathroom and the girls would get dressed in the classroom. Sister Magarette (or Margarita) had gotten foot surgery and hobbled with a cane for at least 3 months (not continuously hobbling or else she would have made it to Canada). Now, as cruel as the caning was, you think she’d beat just that peeping kid but Nooooo, she lined up all the boys in the hallway and one by one, hit our back thighs: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Dude? What the fuck? I didn’t even see anything and I get beat? Their flawed logic was; “The good must suffer with the bad” Meaning then, the good kids would keep the bad ones in line or in other words; sanctioned ass kicking.
Another time I was beat for talking in church. Oh I’m sure Jesus would agree with that one: “Blessed are the meek for they shall…Wait a minute! Who’s talking? You! Boy! Next to that goat! Come here you little bastard! How dare you talk during my eulogy! Let me show you how hard the right hand of God is! Another time we got beat by a woman who whacked you if you failed a test. Oh yeah, that’ll work. What the hell were these people’s problems? What kind of fucked up upbringing creates a nun that beats children? At what point did they choose Nun over Dominatrix or LA cop? The only thing I learned from getting beaten is; don’t ever do that again…In front of them! One nun wasn’t so much as a beater but a sarcastic douche bag. Once, I decided I wasn’t going to get bad grades anymore and I told her so and do you know how she responded? “We’ll see about that.” Wha-wha what? If she were Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman in some feel-good movie about grammar school she would have said: “That’s what I wanna hear solider!
When I use to watch the Ricky Lake/Jenny Jones/Jerry Springer lineup and the "Out of control/whatever/I do what I want" 13 year old girl comes out and causes her mom to shrink with every “bitch” she calls her, of course, like everyone in the audience, I want to cut the rope holding an anvil over her head. But now that THAT could be my kid. I can’t see beating them just because they talked in Pope Ratzinger’s church!
For Christ sake!
The beatings were such an ingrained form of discipline in Catholic school that there was a rumor of a spanking machine. That’s right, some kind of wheeled device with multiple, spiked ping-pong paddles on it that saves the hand of the punisher and administers swift justice to the arse of the offender. One time, I got in trouble for talking (as usual) and I got sent to the principal’s office. I can’t tell you how shitless I was, dead man walking down the hallway, imagining them oiling up ol' 'Betty’ or whatever nickname they had for the machine. When I arrived, they made me sort out a bunch of paperwork. That was it! No spanking machine! I was so relived but also a little disappointed, of course not at the prospect of being beaten bloody by a robot but the fact that something horrible that you believed in and wouldn’t put past the cruelty of the nuns, was only a rumor. This created a little break in their infallible teaching for me which would follow me trough the next 5 or 6 years of their instructions: Perhaps you won’t get pregnant even if you keep your underwear on, perhaps pre marital sex isn’t wrong if you never plan to get married and why is anal sex wrong if Gay people do it and yet I see so much of it in straight porn movies?
Years later, the final straw was them protecting the child molesting priest and ignoring the victim! Perhaps this is that ingrained sadistic center that can’t smack kids around anymore but they sure haven’t got the hang of that “love thy neighbor” thing, yet.
I have yet to find a church that doesn’t beat up on someone. The Dali Lama hates gays as much as the Catholics, Baptist and countless others. Other religions won’t even let women have clitoris or drive cars (perhaps there's a connection there), that it’s okay to blow people up or believe that women can get over Post Partum Depression with prayer. Ugh!
One day I’ll find a less fucked-up religion and maybe then you’ll drag my ass out of bed on a Sunday after a night of baby teething. Until then, Zzzzzzzzz.
That’s it
EM
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Sweaty Hobos, Covered in Butter
We recently went to Atlanta to visit my side of the family and give them a chance to finally meet the girls (15 months later). It was a lot of fun. Got to see my friends too. The girls got compliments on the airplane like: "They were so good.” or “They shut the hell up, real good." On the way back, we got to use the special Homeland Security baby lane which was like 5 people deep, instead of the 500 poor saps who had to wait an hour to get anal probed. Ha! We got express anal probing!
After all of the stimulation of travel, hotel rooms, going off their organic diet for a week and 9000 degree heat plus humidity that was like having a large, sweaty hobo grab your face, it was nice to get back to my Bay Area island in the sea of red state stupidity. It’s taken a while, but I think the girls have finally calmed down and realized there are no more army of people admiring you, just your boring ol’ parents and those dishonorable cats.
z seems to have picked up a souvenir from her cousin j, who’s pretty much the same age as them. She keeps trying to do j’s very high-pitched squeal. Thank god she can’t quite get it because j’s squeal was so bad, my fillings rattled. If z gets it right, we may have to take her back to the hospital: “Excuse me? Do you have a quieter model?” I kid of course (nudge nudge).
"Will someone please Stick a railroad spike trough my head?” This is what I'm thinking as I return to work after being out for a week. There use to be a time I really liked my job..Okay, that's bullshit. There was a time I didn't hate it as much. Back in the day (Yo, yo) it felt more like a team thing. There were staff parties, free movie tickets, perks, even t-shirts with our company name on it. Now, they give you t-shirts instead of raises and movie tickets instead of respect. It seems that all of the people I liked working with either quit or never made it past that 6 months probation period. I miss going to lunch with people or being able to speak off the record about what a fucking back-stabber this guy who sits across from me is. More and more of these backstabbing assholes are being shoved into my office. It's like they're surrounding me, like the cream filling in a jackass cake. The only people that are left are the ones who you know if you tell them anything, the upper management will come to you later and say: "Did we get a customer complaint about X?" My old crew, we would SELF CONTAIN the problem before it would get that far up. We wouldn't cover it up; we would just solve the problem as fast as possible. And what's wrong with that? If I were a boss, all I would say would be if the work is getting done and the customers are happy then leave me the fuck alone.
I was an assistant manager at an art suppy store once and even tough you try to be as "cool" as you can, the "Leave me the fuck alone" technique never really works. No matter how hip you try to be, it was all about the age. I wasn't even 40 and yet the 20-30 year olds treated me as if I was the old coot. It didn't matter that I was a independent comic book artist who use to make his own movies or tried (emphases on tried) to make really terrible music and form an industrial band which never put out an album or played anywhere. (I did get the t-shirts printed tough). The work would always slip as people would slack off and then what? Now you had to come out of the office, wearing your Members Only jacket, sporting a comb-over and your arms akimbo saying:" So, is it break time?" Or: "Do you need something to do?" Yuck! Poo-poo to that.
One of my first jobs was at a fast food chicken joint in the South, during the summer. It was 90 degrees outside and we were stuck in the kitchen where the 9000 degree heat would cook us like Peeps Easter candy in the microwave. Whenever I got a chance, I would sneak into the walk-in fridge and sit on the milk crates. "Ahhhhh!" Occasionally the Members only jacket/comb-over/akimbo arms manager would check in on me: "What are you doing in here?" "Oh, just organizing the eggs." I would respond.
This fast food joint served these really large biscuits and it was our job to brush them, just once with butter before wrapping them up. I always thought that was a rip because I personally would like to taste the butter more. So one time I really lathered it on as if they were sponges. In comes the morning Sunday rush, out go the biscuits, and in comes this pissed off old Black dude. His brown pants, butter stained like he had wet himself
Everyday, they wouldn't let you go until you cleaned the stove and drained the grease from the deep fat fryer. Cleaning the grill involved a long audacious process of scrubbing a still hot, metal slab with a Brillo pad and then after draining the lard pit into these huge buckets, you had to carry this sloshing liquid to this garbage bin containment thing, way the hell in the back. After one brutal shift, at around 2AM, I really wanted to go home and watch the Night Flight video show (is that still on?). Instead of walking the rainy long wet journey to the grease bin, I just dumped the grease next to the side of the building. I'm sure the rats outside were happy about that one: "Hey! Ben! It's like drinking a steak!" The next day, the manager comes in, his pants and Members Only jacket covered in grease and tire marks complaining: "I was riding my motorcycle on the side and hit a slippery patch and whipped out."
I guess I can understand how grossly incompetent and lazy young people can be. And how you really can’t not manage them but still, I wasn’t those freezer-checking managers, I was like working for Patsy and Adina in Ab Fab. You know. Come in whenever, bottle of champagne and caviar in the desk, calling everyone dahling. But did that get me cool Assistant Manager points? Hell no. Will it get me cool points with my girls? All I can say is; if your kids think you’re cool, you’re not doing your job.
That’s it,
EM
After all of the stimulation of travel, hotel rooms, going off their organic diet for a week and 9000 degree heat plus humidity that was like having a large, sweaty hobo grab your face, it was nice to get back to my Bay Area island in the sea of red state stupidity. It’s taken a while, but I think the girls have finally calmed down and realized there are no more army of people admiring you, just your boring ol’ parents and those dishonorable cats.
z seems to have picked up a souvenir from her cousin j, who’s pretty much the same age as them. She keeps trying to do j’s very high-pitched squeal. Thank god she can’t quite get it because j’s squeal was so bad, my fillings rattled. If z gets it right, we may have to take her back to the hospital: “Excuse me? Do you have a quieter model?” I kid of course (nudge nudge).
"Will someone please Stick a railroad spike trough my head?” This is what I'm thinking as I return to work after being out for a week. There use to be a time I really liked my job..Okay, that's bullshit. There was a time I didn't hate it as much. Back in the day (Yo, yo) it felt more like a team thing. There were staff parties, free movie tickets, perks, even t-shirts with our company name on it. Now, they give you t-shirts instead of raises and movie tickets instead of respect. It seems that all of the people I liked working with either quit or never made it past that 6 months probation period. I miss going to lunch with people or being able to speak off the record about what a fucking back-stabber this guy who sits across from me is. More and more of these backstabbing assholes are being shoved into my office. It's like they're surrounding me, like the cream filling in a jackass cake. The only people that are left are the ones who you know if you tell them anything, the upper management will come to you later and say: "Did we get a customer complaint about X?" My old crew, we would SELF CONTAIN the problem before it would get that far up. We wouldn't cover it up; we would just solve the problem as fast as possible. And what's wrong with that? If I were a boss, all I would say would be if the work is getting done and the customers are happy then leave me the fuck alone.
I was an assistant manager at an art suppy store once and even tough you try to be as "cool" as you can, the "Leave me the fuck alone" technique never really works. No matter how hip you try to be, it was all about the age. I wasn't even 40 and yet the 20-30 year olds treated me as if I was the old coot. It didn't matter that I was a independent comic book artist who use to make his own movies or tried (emphases on tried) to make really terrible music and form an industrial band which never put out an album or played anywhere. (I did get the t-shirts printed tough). The work would always slip as people would slack off and then what? Now you had to come out of the office, wearing your Members Only jacket, sporting a comb-over and your arms akimbo saying:" So, is it break time?" Or: "Do you need something to do?" Yuck! Poo-poo to that.
One of my first jobs was at a fast food chicken joint in the South, during the summer. It was 90 degrees outside and we were stuck in the kitchen where the 9000 degree heat would cook us like Peeps Easter candy in the microwave. Whenever I got a chance, I would sneak into the walk-in fridge and sit on the milk crates. "Ahhhhh!" Occasionally the Members only jacket/comb-over/akimbo arms manager would check in on me: "What are you doing in here?" "Oh, just organizing the eggs." I would respond.
This fast food joint served these really large biscuits and it was our job to brush them, just once with butter before wrapping them up. I always thought that was a rip because I personally would like to taste the butter more. So one time I really lathered it on as if they were sponges. In comes the morning Sunday rush, out go the biscuits, and in comes this pissed off old Black dude. His brown pants, butter stained like he had wet himself
Everyday, they wouldn't let you go until you cleaned the stove and drained the grease from the deep fat fryer. Cleaning the grill involved a long audacious process of scrubbing a still hot, metal slab with a Brillo pad and then after draining the lard pit into these huge buckets, you had to carry this sloshing liquid to this garbage bin containment thing, way the hell in the back. After one brutal shift, at around 2AM, I really wanted to go home and watch the Night Flight video show (is that still on?). Instead of walking the rainy long wet journey to the grease bin, I just dumped the grease next to the side of the building. I'm sure the rats outside were happy about that one: "Hey! Ben! It's like drinking a steak!" The next day, the manager comes in, his pants and Members Only jacket covered in grease and tire marks complaining: "I was riding my motorcycle on the side and hit a slippery patch and whipped out."
I guess I can understand how grossly incompetent and lazy young people can be. And how you really can’t not manage them but still, I wasn’t those freezer-checking managers, I was like working for Patsy and Adina in Ab Fab. You know. Come in whenever, bottle of champagne and caviar in the desk, calling everyone dahling. But did that get me cool Assistant Manager points? Hell no. Will it get me cool points with my girls? All I can say is; if your kids think you’re cool, you’re not doing your job.
That’s it,
EM
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