PAgent’s Progress

The past weekend was full of errands and activities. The Boy and I attended a ship launching, which was wicked cool. I got the dog to the dog park. I picked out recipes for Thanksgiving, and went shopping to stock up on the necessary ingredients. I even stocked the bird feeder, suet feeder, and hung the Wife’s new bushtit nest.

But the weekend still feels like a failure. After catching the girl with food (and food residue) in her bedroom a couple of times, we are feeling rather impotent. The last time she earned a solid month with no television, video games, or computer time. You would think that after getting a consequence like that, she would take a step back and reconsider how important it was to refrain from sneaking things into her room.

But no.

We found a half-a-dozen or so empty Coke cans and bottles in her loft bed. Which is doubly troubling because a) she shouldn’t have them in her room, and b) she shouldn’t be having Coke AT ALL. Any child who is getting medicated for ADHD and impulse control has no business getting caffeinated.

When we sat her down and asked her why she was doing it, she said she was having trouble getting up in the morning, and wanted to stay awake in school. Of course, if she went to bed and actually SLEPT when we told her to, she probably wouldn’t be so sleepy in the morning. And her new-found reliance on happy alkaloid molecules went a long way toward explaining why she’s been waking up with a headache.

Since depriving her of the Idiot Box has proven to be unproductive, we tried a different tack. Keeping the kitchen clean has long been a source of stress and discord in our home. Several people have suggested to us that it’s past time the kids took a more active role in housekeeping, but they have perfected a style of work stoppages, slow-downs, and sick-outs that would make an old-time union organizer proud. It is generally more effort to get them to do something than to just do it ourselves, which of course is their intent. But somehow when it becomes a punishment instead of a chore, well, that’s different.

The wife harassed and harangued her through a couple loads of dishes and some hand washing. The Girl was NOT amused, and pretty much acted like we had been making her pick cotton all day. In the hot sun. With no water. It is my hope that after finding out exactly how hard it is to, say, keep a room clean, they might be a little more proactive in keeping things picked up. I know, it’s a pipe dream.

On another topic, I’m still really enjoying Fallout 3. The main storyline is picking up some real depth, with some wicked twists. It has become astoundingly hard to put down, and there are enough areas to explore, and sidequests to complete, to keep me busy for a long, long time.

This is a small plastic lizard:

It has been sitting in the gutter at the end of my driveway for several days now, nestled in the muck and autumn leaves. This is nothing new around my house. Odds and ends and miscellaneous bits often get scattered about. Just this morning I found the Girl’s Croc knock-offs sitting in the street next to the garbage can. But I digress…

As I have been stepping over the little guy, morning and night, it has more or less forced its existence into my consciousness. And I’ve been thinking about its history. Which is more or less thinking about my history.

You see, gentle reader, back before we had kids the Wife and I were callow DINKs, whose favorite pastime was complaining about how we didn’t have any free time while watching television all night long every single night and sleeping in until 10 on weekends.

And we ate meals out far too often, but still rarely ate at the Eugene Red Lobster. You see, unlike the wholesome family atmosphere at the present Tigard Red Lobster, the 1990’s Eugene version seemed to be trying to be a hot spot, a meat market. Party central, if you will. They created new fancy adult beverages on a weekly basis, and then promoted them heavily on television and radio.

One of their favorite gimmicks was to offer the silly-themed and highly alcoholic beverage-of-the-week in an oversized glass, and you could keep the glass! This is how we wound up with a thin 20-ounce glass featuring the image of a lobster dressed as a quarterback. No, really.

One of the few times we went to Red Lobster, we ordered some silly tequila-containing drink, with an equally silly name, that came with a brightly colored plastic lizard perched on the rim. If you study the picture above, you will see that the curvature of the lizard body is particularly well-suited to curving around the rim of a glass.

Being young and somewhat inebriated, we took our plastic lizard home. And forgot about it.

Until we had our daughter. Then at some moment of frustration and panic, when nothing we did seemed to quiet the little demon down, one of us handed her the lizard.

Hey, it didn’t fit into the choke tube, it was solid plastic, one piece, no small parts, and this was long before people were freaking out about phthalates.

Thus, the lizard became a child’s toy. The amazing thing is that it survived to become a toy for our son, as well. And then avoided getting culled through two moves. And now it sits in my gutter.

That’s a mighty long, mighty strange trip for a lizard. But in a way, it mirrors our own strange journey. When I look back at the couple that sucked down that $7 drink at Red Lobster more than a decade ago, it doesn’t even seem like us. I can barely remember living through it, and can only dimly remember what that couple was like. That was us before kids. And everything changes when you have kids.

I remember constantly complaining that I never got to go hiking, and then spending most every weekend doing nothing. I remember complaining that the house was always a mess, when we only had to pick up after ourselves. I remember fighting with my wife nearly constantly, because neither of us had yet admitted that we needed pharmaceuticals to function like sane human beings. But I remember those things dimly, as if they happened to someone else and I heard about it from them.

Me and the lizard. We know where we are, but we’re still not quite sure how we got there.

Go to your local organic food co-op, and wander around loudly complaining that you can’t find the Twinkies.

Go to the zoo and sit just outside the tiger cage holding a leash that’s been raggedly sheared off about a foot from the end, weeping inconsolably.

Sell dime bags of recrystallized caffeine on the corner. Advise your clients to snort it all at once.

Go to your local electronics mart, and replace all the demo DVDs playing on the ginormous televisions with copies of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.

Get dressed in a nice blazer and slacks, slick back your hair, then go stand in the elevator and push buttons for people. “What floor? Fourth? Very good, sir.”

Get a fake arm at a Halloween prop store, paint the end with stage blood, and walk along the edge of the highway holding it hand-to-hand with the bloody end extending into traffic. If anyone stops you and questions you, look at it in shock and scream “AAAAGH!! WHERE’S MY GIRLFRIEND??”

Go to McDonalds and ask them if their beef is really made from ground earthworms. When they deny it, look around surreptitiously and ask if you could get one as a special order.

Get 8-10 used and empty Venti cups from Starbucks. Scatter them around your seat on a city bench, where you sit twitching constantly, and compulsively checking your watch. Stare intently at passers-by and occasionally scream “OH MY GOD TIME IS SLOWING DOWN!!”

In Fallout 3, I am given missions to complete that require persistence and a set of lethal skills, and if I am successful I may help civilization recover from its descent into anarchy.

As a parent, I am given missions that require the patience of Buddha and the persistence of Sisyphus, and the only potential reward is the opportunity to do it again tomorrow.

In Fallout 3, I have the option of playing as a hero or as an evil bastard. It’s my choice.

As a parent, I’m pretty much locked into an alignment of Chaotic Clueless.

In Fallout 3, if I run into an obstinate NPC, I can bribe them, or try to persuade them with my Speech skill.

As a parent, when dealing with an obstinate child, I always have to resort to my Threat skill, and the kid nearly always makes their saving throw.

Eventually, if I apply myself and do everything right, I might win Fallout 3.

As a parent, even if I apply myself and do everything right, the best I can hope for is to not lose for another day.

And last but not least, if someone gets in my face and pisses me off in Fallout 3, I can blow their head clean off, in an impressive spray of carnage.

As a parent, not only am I not allowed to kill them, but I’m faced with the cruel fact that no matter how obnoxious they get, I will still love them more than anything else in my life.

Strange Trip continued….

After crossing the width of Washington State, I passed through Spokane and headed into the Idaho panhandle. The strongest memory I have of this area is how incredibly beautiful it was. After the rolling treeless plains of Eastern Washington, entering the Rocky Mountains was like passing into the Promised Land. I keep telling myself I’ll go back someday and really explore the area, but I haven’t yet.

At the time of my pilgramage east, the tiny mining town of Wallace, Idaho had the last stoplight remaining on Interstate 90. It was kind of surreal, after hours and hours of uninterrupted highway to come to an intersection with a traffic light. I dutifully stopped there, and then moved on.

The stoplight isn’t there any more.

It’s in a museum.

Not long after leaving Wallace, I crossed into Montana, having crossed the width of Idaho in a few short hours. I thought that was pretty funny. I wouldn’t be laughing after crossing Montana.

I pulled into Missoula for the night, bringing my first full day of driving to an end, and checked into some little motel.

I was concerned that sitting on my butt for five days and eating nothing but road food was going to have an adverse effect on my health, and my pants size, so I had promised myself to at least attempt to eat healthy dinners. So, when I sat down at the restaurant next to the motel and scanned the menu, I was presented with a bit of a dilemma.

I could pretty much have anything I wanted, as long as it was beef. Steaks, roasts, prime rib, etc., no problem, but I doubt anyone in the place could even spell vegetarian. After looking the menu up and down several times, I ordered a salad. The waitress looked at me.

“What else would you like?” she asked.

“Just a salad.”

She looked confused, but walked off to get my order. Clearly this was not a normal order in this place. I was in beef country, and not eating of the sacred cow was probably a violation of local mores. This would not be the last time that I would find myself adrift among unfamiliar social conventions.

So, I had made it to cattle country. All I had to do next was cross the rest of Montana.

To be continued…

A posting of a journal entry I made at another website. It’s one of my favorites.

My son is in kindergarten. He enjoys it very much.

The other day he announced “Dad, I saw an elf today!”

I said, “Oh, really?” thinking that he was talking about a cartoon character.

“Yeah. He’s in second grade.”

I gave him a double-take. My wife, who spends a lot of time at the kids’ school, smoothly stepped in. “He’s not an elf, sweetie, he’s a midget. He’s a regular little boy, he’s just shorter than the other kids.”

Ah. I spoke up again “I think they like to be called ‘little people’, not midgets. And you should treat him like any other kid, okay?”

He said okay, and went on doing whatever he was doing. My wife and I had done our duty as politically correct parents–acknowledging the differences without emphasizing them.

But I keep thinking about it. For a couple of hours, my son believed he went to school with an elf. I mean, how cool is that? He completely accepted that elves existed, and one went to his school. And I feel just a little sad that we had to burst that particular bubble.