Power Outage

No post today. My power is out thanks to a "routine" electrical panel maintenance initiative brought to you by the good folks at Pepco. It takes way too long to type on this tiny iPhone screen so we'll be doing this mich later today.

On the bright side, this beats the stereotypical reason for not having power...somebody lost their job.

On a more humorous note, my wife is now forced to go wash the rest of our clothes down at the river against the rocks. She mistimed the power outage so now our semiwashed clothes are sitting in the laundry rooms.

Moral of the story...I know everything.

The Lord's Prayer

Got some stuff going on right now. Very sad day. Don't wanna talk about it. Don't plan on writing about it anytime soon. Tomorrow isn't looking any better. So why I am here at eleven o clock at night staring at this computer? For some strange reason, this feels therapeutic. For an even stranger reason, Sister Act 2 just popped in my head. "If you wake up and all you think about is [writing] then you're supposed to be a [writer]." So here I am.

Here's a memory...

I was in Sunday School when I was about five or six. The teacher said that we were gonna learn the Lord's Prayer. I was the only one who didn't know it already which is probably proof that I was destined to go to hell. I read it out of the Bible while everyone else said it from memory.

To encourage me (or punish me, depending on how you look at it) the teacher signed me up to say it the next week in front of the church. I tried my best to memorize it, but I just couldn't. All week long, I looked at it and never made it past "who art in heaven." Everyone tried their best to help me learn it. It just wouldn't stick.

My grandmother hated to be embarrassed. She was the Joe Jackson of my church. You are NOT gonna get up there and embarrass me. She had this cadre of friends at church. I guess all old women have them. They're like a posse of senior citizens who have a reserved pew like the mafia and sit there whispering to one another as they talk trash about what's going on during the service.

Anyway, as a made-(wo)man of the senior citizen mafia, she couldn't have me mess up her chances of becoming Don one day. So what did she do? "You see this right here? I will give you this five dollars right now if you can recite that thing to me in the next ten minutes. Go sit over there on them steps and read it and come back."

Seven minutes later...
"Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen."

With five fresh dollars in my pocket, I got up in front of that church with mic in hand and recited it like my name was Martin Luther King Jr and that podium was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Believe me when I tell you....people cried.

I know it's not my usual brand of story, but considering what's going on today...it just felt like something I should write.

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I have insomnia and have discovered the healing power of sleep aids. If you see this message then I'm still asleep. Be happy for me. It means that I'm not having a Fight Club moment and realizing that my daughter doesn't really exist and I've been starting all these fight clubs by myself. Check back after noon...unless the sleeping pills work too well.

Ms Independent

Ms Independent

Today we went for a walk. My daughter was driving me completely insane in the house, so I figured that I'd push her around in the stroller until she fell asleep. That's what it's come to now. My idea of peace is walking around DC with no particular destination like some kind of vagrant. Now remember a few posts ago when I explained why parents dote on their kids. They start off kinda slow, so you get excited when something remotely intelligent happens. Keep that in mind when I tell you this.

My daughter has gone "Skynet" on me. She's self aware. It used to be that I could put some clothes on her, throw on her shoes and stick in her in the stroller. That shit doesn't fly anymore. If you put her shoes on her BEFORE putting her in the stroller, then she assumes that we're all going for a walk (as in me AND her will be walking). Also important to note: Once you put some jeans on her, she expects that we're leaving the house shortly.

So, I put some jeans on her and she immediately dropped what she was doing, ran over to the TV and turned it off. I went to get the stroller and at that exact moment I realized that I left it in the trunk of the car. So you know what that means.
A) I'm putting shoes on her and she's going to go ballistic when we get to the car and I pull out the stroller.
B) I'm taking the jeans back off of her and canceling the whole outing and she's going ballistic. It's a lose-lose either way.

So I go with option A. We walk to the car, which once again is parked across the street from the playground. We argue the entire walk past the playground as I explain that we're not going today. We get to the car and I grab the stroller and she looks at me with these puppy dog eyes while whimpering out "Walk? Walk? Walk?" FINE! Okay, you can walk.

I decide to go to the grocery store which is a mile and a half away. I'm thinking to myself: There's no way she'll walk that far. She'll get tired and beg me to put her in the stroller. Fatigue from the walk will put her to sleep instantly, and then I can run back home and have at least two hours to myself.

Do you know that this little two year old girl walked the entire way like she trained with Dr King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Not only did she walk the whole way, she skipped, danced and did everything in her power to make what is usually a 20 minute walk take about an hour and a half. I was more stressed out when I got there than I was when I left the house. The whole point was to do the opposite of that.

Now there was a funny moment. We got about two blocks from the store when I think she did start to get tired, but being spiteful she refused to get in the stroller. Instead, she decided to sit down on the stairs in front of this house. I looked at her and said, "Come on, baby. We gotta go." She looks up at me, then looks down at her foot. She reached down and untied her shoe then said to me, "Tie the shoe." So I knelt down, tied her shoe and got up to walk away and she untied the other one. "Daddy, tie the shoe."

I tied the other one and started walking away. "I'm gonna leave you. You better come on. Bye." Do you know that she looked at me and said, "Goodbye Daddy. Be careful. I'll miss you!" Then she turned her head the other way and started looking at stuff in the yard like my leaving had no bearing on the rest of her day. I can't lie, I'm loving the independence. I still snatched her up and put her in the stroller.

Etymology

So I'm sitting down by the Potomac yesterday having what was probably the most relaxing day I've had in months. I mean I did absolutely nothing yesterday and it was wonderful. I went to Panera and read a book then I left to go down by the river to just chill and watch the boats go by. It was peaceful as hell until this grasshopper jumped on me and scared the hell out of me.

Laugh if you want, but I don't do bugs. If it had been a snake or a rat or something, I would've picked it up with my bare hands and tossed it somewhere. But a bug…nope. So anyway, I started thinking to myself...

Why do we call them grasshoppers? I'm not stupid. It makes sense. They hop around in the grass…grasshoppers. I'm just saying that when I look at an elephant I don't think, "Hey it's elephanting. That's why it's called an elephant." I know that words have different origins and The English language is lazy at times, but I just wonder at what point in the "assigning names to things" process did someone look at the ground, see a green thing jumping around and say…"That's a grasshopper."

There are two ways to look at it. Perhaps it was at the infancy of the "naming things" movement. It was a new craft and no one really had a handle on things so they were just keeping it simple. If that's the case then as they gained more experience their creativity evolved. It started slow with grasshopper and then they saw a cricket and were like "Shit, that thing hops too. Hmmm, what's that sound it's making? Sounds like it's cricking. Crick-et!" Soon they got the hang of it and started fancying things up…"Caterpillar!"

On the other hand, it could've gone the other way. Maybe they started with fancy names like "Iguana" and eventually just got lazy. "Fuck it, I'm calling that a 'fly' because that's what it does." Somebody else was like, "But what about those things up in the tree?" Somebody slapped him and said, "they're birds!"
"But that doesn't make any sense! They fly too..." (Slapped in face again)
"I said…they're birds! Those are birds, and these are flies"
"Okay, so what are we, walks?"
(Slapped again!)

I'm guessing it went something like that.

Twilight...Hmph!

My wife is in the living room watching one of the Twilight movies. I don't know which one. It's the one where the girl is in love with the vampire and the werewolf at the same time and the werewolf wants to fight the vampire but they don't and then somebody wants to kill the girl but doesn't and then the girl wants to turn into a vampire but can't. Yeah, that one.

She said she wanted to look at something romantic. I don't know how Twilight fits into that. It's just a bunch of whiny ass people moping around despite having demigod powers. I suggested Titanic, which will always be my favorite romantic movie. It's hard to find a woman nowadays who'll jump out of a life boat and back onto a sinking ship to die with you. Although...if she'd stayed on the life boat, Leonardo DiCaprio probably would've found that hunk of wood after the ship sank and been able to get on by himself to survive.

But back to Twilight.... I can't get past the premise. I watched the first one because I thought it was an action/horror movie about a girl falling in love with a guy who turns out to be a vampire who tries to kill her for the rest of the movie. Kinda like a white version of Vampire in Brooklyn. Imagine my surprise.

Anyway, I couldn't get past the part about them being a family of vampires who travel from place to place every few years so that they can pass for high school students. Maybe I'm too logical, but I can't get past figuring out how that works. I have a kid who's about to start school next year. They want a birth certificate, social security card, utility bill, copy of my lease and immunization records to get her in the school. Some places are doing home visits to verify residency.

You expect me to believe that they just up and go somewhere else and get their 25 year old looking vampire kids into high school without any problems? How do you even get a job as a vampire? I would think that in this post 9/11 world where you need a urine sample just to get a library card that someone would notice that these people move every four years.

And then if I could play Joker for a second, "Why so serious?" The whole damned movie the guy is moping around because he's a vampire. And he's not even a real vampire. Sunlight doesn't kill them. Crosses and garlic don't do anything. I think I saw one of them praying so I'm guessing holy water is out. You are a real deal immortal and you're sad?

Do you know how many people in the world just died in the time it took for me to write this sentence? And not even from big stuff like gunshot wounds or floods. They died from little stuff like a paper cut that got infected.

People die because they're hungry and they happen to live in a place that doesn't specialize in food. You don't even need food to live. Hell, you don't need water. All you need is blood and not only are you okay, you're running through the forest jumping through trees. Blood is everywhere. You don't have to kill anybody. Just have a sip or two and keep it moving.

And what the hell is wrong with the girl who's the main character? I can understand why she wants to turn into a vampire. I'd sign up for that in heartbeat. You're telling me that I can walk the streets of DC at night and not worry about getting shot, stabbed or hit by a Metrobus? Sign me up! I just don't understand why she doesn't fix herself up first or something.

It's my understanding that you're stuck looking exactly the same once you turn. Well if that's the case then go fix yourself up first. Get in shape. Get some sun. Do a few squats or pushups or something. I'm not in the best shape right now. Don't think I wouldn't be doing some P90X or something for a few months and then turn into a vampire. Forever is  a long time to look 17. What clubs do you plan to be able to get into a hundred years from now?

And who in their right mind wants to do high school over and over and over for eternity? These are the dumbest vampires I've ever seen.

Flu Shot

I can't write much today. I have to conserve my energy for battle. Today my daughter gets a flu shot. Taking her to the doctor is almost like The Eliminator on American Gladiators, but harder. First, there's the treadmill at the beginning. That's where I have to run around the house trying to get her dressed. I'll distract her with the iPod and then sneak her clothes on her. She'll have to pee just as soon as we're about to walk out the door, so I'll have to go sit her on the toilet. If I'm lucky she won't maneuver herself into a weird position where she sprays all over the place (don't ask).

We'll get to the car and she'll throw a fit because the only spot I could find yesterday was in front of the playground. She's gonna think that's where we're going and when I open the car door all hell will break loose. I'll try to get her in the car without it looking like I'm kidnapping a child from said playground. We'll drive downtown and I'll play "Where's the Parking Space." I don't have any quarters, so I have to hope I find one of the meters that takes credit cards.

I'll take her out of the car and let her walk to the office that way she'll be slightly tired when the main event comes. But before the main event we'll stop at every manhole cover so that she can spell out "S-E-W-E-R" and "W-A-T-E-R" and of course "P-E-P-C-O." She yells these letters out to me like I'm slow. If I pass one she looks so sad at the missed opportunity to bring literacy to my savage race.

We'll get to the building, ascend the elevator and go into the office. They'll do the usual, "Wow she's gotten so big!" I'll sign in, while she begins to establish herself as the alpha-toddler in the waiting room. I'll try to keep her from walking up to baby carriers and trying to remove the faces of the babies inside. Other parents will allow their kids to cough and sneeze into the air prompting me to activate the imaginary forcefield that I choose to believe exists all the way in the corner where I'll move my daughter to. Then the nurse will come out.

She'll say my daughter's name instead of mine, as if she's actually going to respond. My daughter will follow me down the hall, while slowly piecing together the fragments of her goldfish memory from yesteryear. Around the time we get to the waiting room, her brain's loading screen will be at 75%. Since it's just a flu shot, they won't have me strip her down to her pull-up, so she won't quite know what's going on. That will soon change.

The nurse will return with a tray, a glove and the back-up nurse that my daughter now gets everytime it's shot-time ever since she went Incredible Hulk on us a year ago. Once my daughter sees the other nurse in scrubs, she'll have a Fight Club/Usual Suspects moment where, thanks to a ton of flashbacks, she'll realize exactly what's going on. She will scream at a decibel level that rivals the most expensive commercial grade surround sound systems.

The nurse will say, "Okay, you take the arms and hold them by her sides, the other nurse will take her legs and I will inject the shot." My daughter's pupils will dilate, her biceps will flex, and her body will levitate off the table. One of them will say, "I forgot how strong she is." They'll stick in the shot, my daughter will turn into Gozer and take the form of a Tazmanian Devil and will roll off the table.

"All done!" will be the battlecry for the two nurses to retreat to the safety of somewhere else and my daughter will look up at me from behind watery globes as if to say, "I trusted you with my life." Less than 30 seconds later, she will act as if nothing happened and ask to play with the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. We will leave and pass several concerned and confused children in the waiting room who are all clinching their parents in terror as they try to figure out what happened in the other room. My daughter will say, "Goodbye!" to the girls at the front desk as if nothing happened.

I will suffer arm, shoulder and various pains in my lower abdominal from holding her down. So yeah...no post today.