I let tourists come hang out in the backyard sometimes, if they promise to wear geeky hiking clothes and only micturate in the porto-potties I've provided by the parking lot. My wife Kara and I just returned from visiting the most recent one of our friends to take the parental plunge. The sensation of watching one’s friends become parents is a lot like standing behind the safety fence at an amusement park, watching the roller coasters go by as people scream their heads off high above, turning in gigantic loops and having the money shaken out of their pockets. Some of those people didn’t even mean to get in line for the ride, but they actually all seem to be having a pretty good time now. For the time being, Kara and I are content to stand by the fence and watch, letting our friends and the guy with the Megadeth tattoo on his neck get in line ahead of us.
Last weekend, I watched in amazement as my friend (whose name also happens to be Kara, so for the purposes of keeping this narrative semi-comprehensible, I’ll call her Cheetara) seemed so natural at being a mom after only having five weeks’ practice.
“Here,” Cheetara said, “You can hold him,” bringing her tiny little baby boy over to me. Baby and I eyed each other, both a little unsure of the impending transaction. Some people are natural born baby-holders. Kara, for instance, can hold a baby like nobody’s business. She could hold a baby through a carwash without waking it up. I get nervous just holding somebody else’s wine glasses for fear of breaking them. And wine glasses don’t wriggle around. Also, wine glasses don’t cry if they suspect that you are a bad person, leading everyone else in the room to think that maybe the wine glass has picked up on something they’ve been overlooking all these years.
Cheetara gently handed Baby over, and I did my best not to let him smell my fear. Luckily, his senses aren’t too keen yet. He went to sleep in my arms with his binkie perched in his mouth and his legs dangling in the air. He was just so peaceful and perfect, all I could think about as I looked down at him was, “Little Dude, I think there’s something terrible in your diapers.”
I quickly passed him back to his rightful owner. When I asked Cheetara about the tribulations of diaper-changing, she perpetuated one of the great lies of parenthood. “Oh, they’re not bad at all. He only goes number two about once a day, and it’s hardly even noticeable. It doesn’t look like you’d expect at all.”
I was soon to see the horrible truth. A dirty diaper looks exactly like what I expected. Worse, actually.
“Oh, naaaasty,” Kara said.
Cheetara deftly wiped him down as he just chilled out on a blanket on the floor wearing only a binkie and a smile. It works out pretty well that babies are totally cool just hanging out naked, because they sure do have to spend a lot of time like that. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s right. Check me out. I’m anatomically correct.”
By the way, did you know that McDonald’s will put the sugar and cream right into the coffee for you now? This is what business students call innovation. Pretty soon, you’ll never have to touch a creamer again. It’s kind of a shame, though, because my friend Josh does this really funny trick where he pretends that he has something is his eye, and he rubs his eyeball with his closed fist going, “Aw, man, my eye is killing me!” Then he takes a fork in his other hand and sticks it into his fist, like he’s going to scratch his eye with the fork.
And as you’re sitting there watching him, the syrup dripping off the pancake on your fork, thinking to yourself, “Is he seriously going to scratch his eye with a fork?”, that’s when he pops the fork into the creamer that was hidden in his fist, making a sound that, on an old-time radio show, would certainly have passed for an eyeball being punctured -- of course, if you had listened to this performance on an old radio show, not only would you have been helpfully reminded to drink more Ovaltine, but your pancakes would not have been ruined from the creamer splatter.
If McDonald’s has its way, Josh won’t be able to do that trick anymore, which I think we can all agree would really be a shame. At least he’ll still be able to do the thing where he grabs his head like he’s going to crack his neck, and then just as he turns his head to the side, he smashes a Tic-Tac container that he’s hidden in his hand, making it sound like he’s broken something very important. Ah, that Josh. He should really get a job.
Anyway, I recently heard the morning DJ working himself into a foamy lather over the fact that some elementary school teachers are using the phrase, “sitting pretzel style,” rather than “sitting Indian style.” He was very angered about this, mostly because very angry people draw a crowd.
After thinking about it for a while, I decided to be really angered about it, too. Clearly, our kids should not be taught to emulate snack foods of any kind. Where would it end? Today, pretzels. Tomorrow, HoHos.
In my estimation, though, what’s sadder than the proliferation of snack-related sitting positions amongst our children is the precipitous decline in our national regard for the Seinfeld rerun. You used to be able to depend on Twinkies and Seinfeld reruns to never get old. But I think those reruns have lost a little bit of their luster ever since Kramer had to go and mess them up with his racist tirade, which must have, by now, been shown on the internet more times than that video of the French guy head-butting the other guy in the chest during that big cricket match.
After the event, which couldn’t have been run more smoothly by Tom Cruise’s publicist, Kramer apologized to Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who shot him down like they’d taken lessons from Cindy Beal, who shot me down for the prom like she’d taken lessons from the Red Baron. That is, if the Red Baron had his mom answer the phone to say that the Baron was doing homework and couldn’t talk.
A couple of weeks ago, the morning DJ asked the question, “Who would someone apologize to if they offended white people?”
Of course, the DJ was being disingenuous. The bigger issue is who deserves an apology when you’ve offended humankind in general. Also, the answer is Jeff Foxworthy.
For those unfamiliar with Game Boys, they are handheld devices with tiny little screens that devour childhoods whole, allowing kids to play video games when they should be out catching fireflies and smooshing them on their shoes as a warning to all other low-flying insects. Parents who allow Game Boy-playing in restaurants are clearly putting their kids into a high-risk category; these kids are far more likely than their peers to mature into adults who wear Bluetooth headsets when they’re not even talking on the phone, like they think they’re platoon commanders or Old Navy employees.
I can only imagine how my parents would have reacted if I’d have whipped out my old Game Boy (which was black-and-white and carved from a granite slab) at the dinner table, much less at a restaurant. The only game on that Game Boy would have been “Super Mario Brothers: I’m Looking at My Bare Hands Now Because Mom Just Snatched My Game Boy.”
As you can probably tell, Kara and I like to criticize everyone else’s parenting skills, because when you don’t have any kids, you have lots of time for stuff like that. You can also watch movies that do not feature talking bears, and you can say bad words without having to spell them out.
But we’ve also been thinking about babies a lot lately, mainly because our friends are proving to be slightly more fertile than the Tigris-Euphrates river basin. Sometimes, they even find that out on purpose. Walking through the aisles of Target yesterday to hunt for some presents for a baby shower, we were amazed at the contraptions that are available to new parents.
“Oh man,” Kara said, “Look at this thing.”
She was pointing towards a device that looked like it should have been offered for sale at a farm auction instead of in the baby aisle. It reminded me of the episode of Sesame Street where they visit the dairy farm.
“I can’t believe you actually have to hook yourself up to this thing. I wonder if it hurts,” Kara said.
“Moo,” I replied, feeling very gender fortunate, but also thinking about how much easier life would be if, like cows, people could just eat hay. You could keep a bale in the kitchen and just go to town on it whenever you wanted. No preparation, no dishes. I’m not sure if you’d want to figure out how to chew on your cud, though, because that seems pretty gross.
We ended up purchasing a baby wipe warmer. I had no idea that baby wipe warmers even existed, but apparently baby-wiping technology has come a long way. We thought that this gift was also culturally relevant at the moment, because if you’ve seen the movie “Hannibal Rising,” which of course you haven’t because it’s terrible, you find out that Hannibal Lecter would have grown up to be a park ranger if his mother hadn’t used cold baby wipes on him.
Judging from what we saw in the mall, our baby-having friends sure seem to be in for it. Parenting these days offers challenges that weren’t around even a few years ago. For one thing, kids have wheels in their sneakers now, which makes them nearly impossible to catch, especially on inclined planes. They just glide on along like they’ve evolved without us. At least they refuse to wear helmets, just like when I was a kid. Fads may come and go, but cranial contusions never go out of style.
You can give Mike Todd a timeout online at mikectodd@gmail.com.
Chopper’s coffee is the warm water that comes out of the faucet before it gets hot enough for a shower. Either my wife Kara or I will spoon him some warm water with our hands, and he’ll take a few enthusiastic licks before he runs off to find some remote corner of the house to convert into his very own half bath. He’s quite the little architect.
Last Saturday morning was different, though. Chopper and I both stood there beside the tub, waiting for the warm water to start like we were waiting for Godot. I only reference “Waiting for Godot” now because I had to read it in high school even though not a single blessed thing happened during the whole play except for two guys standing around like idiots talking about nothing like it was a presidential debate. Since reading that play hasn’t done me a lick of good except that I kind of felt in on the joke while watching the movie “Waiting for Guffman,” which everyone in the world except me thought was hilarious, at least I can make myself feel marginally smarter by mentioning the play here, because smart people prove their smartness either by mentioning obscure literary works in regular conversation or by questioning other people’s patriotism. Both ways work.
Even though only the hot tap was turned on, the water felt like glacial runoff. I yelled up the stairs, “Did you use all the hot water for your shower?”
After a brief pause, Kara said, “Oh, I think I might have fallen asleep in the shower this morning. Sorry.”
The fact that she had fallen asleep while standing up would have been perfectly understandable if she had, at any time during her shower, been a giraffe, or if our brand of soap had been Irish Narcoleptic.
Chopper gave up and wandered off. I crawled back into bed.
“Hey, what are you doing? Take a shower and let’s go get something to eat. I’m a little bit hungry,” she said.
“I’m a little bit rock and roll,” I replied, high-fiving myself.
“Seriously. Get ready and let’s go,” she said.
This was the low point in my morning, compounded by the fact that the news was reporting that chimps are making weapons now. It’s only a matter of time before they start selling them to rogue states and dolphins.
So I took a lightning-fast shower, keeping warm by bathing in a steady stream of expletives. A certain warmth also emanated from the knowledge that I had just earned Good Husband tokens, which could be spent in any number of ways, including, but not limited to, practicing poor toilet etiquette and not looking up from the computer screen while she was talking to me.
When fate smiles on you and lets your significant other wrong you in some small way, it’s very important not to get too excited, lest you turn into the bad guy, which can happen quicker than you might think. Wringing everything you can out of your partner’s mistake is a delicate art form. You have just been given a precious little egg, an egg that you must nurture until it hatches into a beautiful little swan of revenge. At least that’s what I hear from other married people. I would never do such a thing. I’m too busy heating up shower water on the stove.
You can offer to be a ferret’s barista online at mikectodd@gmail.com.
Even if that spider was radioactive and its bite would have enabled me to hang upside-down by my ankles while making out with Kirsten Dunst, I still don’t think I would have said yes. Luckily, I wasn’t crazy in the first place, so I could just have a normal person’s healthy fear of gigantic spiders that have mandibles big enough to pop the cap off a Heineken bottle, and I didn’t have to let them use me as a jungle gym to get over it.
When Josh came to visit at my house, my dad asked a question that to Josh sounded something like this: “Josh, hour yir spah dirs?”
“Excuse me?” Josh asked.
“I said, ‘hour yir spah dirs?’”
This exchange continued similarly for a couple more volleys, until Josh had spent all of his “I’m sorry, I still didn’t catch that” tokens without understanding yet what my dad was saying to him. Rather than asking Dad to repeat it again, Josh paused a moment, I believe to contemplate his chances of a successful dash out the front door.
“Josh, he’s asking how your spiders are,” my mom finally said.
I don’t even notice my parents’ Southern accents. They’ve lived in Pennsylvania for over thirty years now, but they brought some parts of North Carolina and Florida with them that haven’t ever left. Josh could understand Mom because Florida is barely even in the South; it’s like Maryland with Disney World and old people. The South kind of stops at Georgia and heads west, dying somewhere out in the Texas desert because that’s where Dick Cheney shot it in the face.
“Oh, oh, they’re fine. Thank you for asking,” Josh replied. Later, he said to me, “Dude, I need subtitles to talk to your dad.” He should hear my dad when we visit family down South. Every mile traveled on I-95 thickens the accent just a little bit more. By the time we get there, “split” is very nearly a two-syllable word. When people up North inquire about the origins of Dad’s accent, his favorite answer is: “it’s from Southern Pennsylvania.”
I thought of all this recently as I traveled down South for work. Besides being surrounded by my favorite accent in the world, I was pleased to find that Southern people don’t relish running down pedestrians like we do in the North. In the North, we have to play real-life Frogger to get to the other side of the street. You can actually hear cars revving their engines when you step into a crosswalk, like all drivers see when they look at you is a waving checkered flag.
I think a diploma from Penn State carries just a little more weight when employers consider the Darwinian implications of a graduate successfully crossing College Avenue every day for several years. This is one of the reasons that Penn State diplomas carry the Latin phrase “E veritas destinas childus” at the bottom, which translates to: “I’m a survivor, not gon’ give up. Not gon’ stop (what). Keep on survivin’.”
When you’re walking on a sidewalk in the South, if you have the thought, “I might just venture over to that crosswalk here in the next couple of minutes,” traffic will come to a screeching halt, the smell of burnt brake pads wafting into the air.
Southern parents probably just tell their kids, “It’s a big waste of time to look both ways before you cross the street, so don’t even bother.”
Y’all can email Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.
Saturdays are usually two-clickers. Regular work days are three-clickers. Days where I have to stand up and speak in front of an audience bigger than my bathroom mirror are four-clickers. That’s the maximum on the click scale. I don’t know what would constitute a five-clicker, but it would probably have to be a day something like the kind Jack Bauer has about once a year.
Speaking of which, why isn’t Jack doing deodorant commercials? “When I’m methodically shocking somebody I was friends with three minutes ago with a stripped wire from a hotel lamp, I need to make sure I’m dry. And it doesn’t hurt if I smell like a Mountain Breeze, too. ZZZZZAP!”
The click scale is per-armpit, of course, so a four-clicker is really a total of eight clicks, for those who might be thinking of trying this at home. Sometimes I accidentally click too many times on a side, in which case I try to do the majority of my sweating on the side that has more deodorant, which would be easier to do if I wasn’t so dang bilaterally symmetrical.
I’m traveling for work this week, attending a conference that requires me not only to extract my shampoo from tiny little bottles, but also to overcome my irrational fear of speaking at the front of a room while a bunch of people stare at me. Public speaking is something that I look forward to almost as much as I look forward to Eddie Murphy fat suit movies. That is to say, I do not look forward to it all that much.
When people find out that you’re traveling for work, they like to say things like, “Oh, the company’s paying for you to take a little vacation, huh?”
They’re right. Traveling for work really is almost exactly like a regular vacation, except that your friends and family can’t come with you and you have to do work the entire time, and occasionally you have to do things that terrify you.
I’m reminded of the old Seinfeld bit in which he notes that most people are more scared of public speaking than of death, which means that at a funeral most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. I don’t think I’d take it that far, but if there’s one thing that can be said for Seinfeld, it’s that he’s never driven across the country wearing diapers to pepper spray an astronaut. I love that about him.
I’ve found that the key to surviving public speaking is just to practice as many times as possible beforehand, and also to give away free T-shirts if you can. If I have to speak extemporaneously, the sensation is similar to driving off the road into a cornfield, with ears of corn bonking into the windshield as I desperately try to find my way back onto the road without saying some boneheaded thing that spectators might later describe as “Oedipal.” Practice is always of the utmost importance, unless you’re a really famous professional athlete, in which case skipping practice will just make you more famous.
When I have to leave for these trips every now and again, my wife Kara and I like to make a big deal out of saying goodbye, like it’s the last scene in Casablanca. That only problem is that I’m the one getting on the plane, so I think that makes me Ingrid Bergman.
The biggest disappointment of the game came when the final whistle blew without Gillette introducing a razor with six blades. How long are they going to make us wait? I’m not going to make the jump from my Mach 3 just to buy a razor with a measly five blades. If they sweetened the pot just a little, so that my razor started to resemble a wheat threshing implement, I’d be in there like swimwear. In any case, the day can’t be far off that we’ll be spending more on razor refills than we do on gas or mocha choca latte yayas.
I’m still hoping that Gillette will step up to the plate, as the Great Hair Migration from the top of my head to the rest of my body is causing me to have to shave more than twice a week. Five o’clock shadow used to be two days late, but now it’s starting to show up on time. I still haven’t gotten any better at shaving since I was thirteen, though, and my morning forays in front of the bathroom mirror usually result in unspeakable carnage. Incidentally, Hamburger Helper makes an excellent aftershave. The women can’t resist the Cheddar Cheese Melt.
I have a decent electric shaver that allows me to mow my face, but it doesn’t really get all the stubble, plus I remember an old news story asking the question, “Can radiation from electric shavers raise your risk of cancer?” Of course the answer is no, but the thought still sticks in my head, even though a quick Google search finds that the only people who lend any credence to such a story also think that wearing a hunk of quartz around their necks improves the mental well-being of anyone other than the person who sold it to them.
Besides, when the title of a news story ends with a question mark, the answer will never be given in the story. A question mark at the end of a news story title means, “We were jus’ wonderin’. We dunno, either.”
The most important thing I learned during the Super Bowl is that Grissom is coming back to CSI, which means, as you probably have already figured out, that he left it at some point. Anyway, it will be good to have him back. Judging from the commercials, he took some time off to either be a mall Santa or to enter a Hemingway look-alike contest. In any event, someone should get that guy a six-bladed razor.
Did you see the Snickers commercial where two dudes kissed Lady-and-the-Tramp style? The implication seems to be that Snickers is so good that it has the power to temporarily alter your sexual orientation. If this is true, you would be well-advised to seriously consider your company before consuming your next Snickers bar.
The most heartfelt moment of the Super Bowl came after the game ended, when Cadillac donated a car to the MVP. If there’s anyone who could use some free wheels, it’s definitely the richest guy in the stadium. I bet he’ll be glad to not have to take the bus to practice anymore.
Even so, I like to consider myself a survivor. Come dinner time, even when we haven’t been grocery shopping in weeks, I can almost always scrounge a meal together as long as I can find something from one of the four main non-perishable food groups: peanut butter, popcorn, Bavarian pretzels or Lucky Charms.
Bear Grylls, my new hero, wouldn’t need any of these things to survive. For those who haven’t seen him, Bear is the star of the Discovery Channel show “Man vs. Wild,” a series that stacks the odds in favor of “Man” by bringing a Mt. Everest-climbing British Special Forces commander to the fight. This hardly seems fair, as “Wild” would have a much better chance of winning against your average clean-fingernailed humor columnist. In each episode, Bear skydives into a different remote location and has to survive, carrying only a canteen and a knife, until he can find his way back to civilization or Wal-Mart, whichever comes first.
What’s striking about the show is how quickly man must remember to act like an animal when he’s no longer in the vicinity of his TiVo. Bear climbs up to birds’ nests so that he can steal the eggs and eat them raw. He catches fish with his bare hands and kills them with his teeth, eating a very graphic sushi lunch that my wife Kara and I could only watch through our fingers.
Bear also goes the extra mile, flinging himself into quicksand pits and icy lakes on purpose, just to show you what to do if you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, like when you can’t find your car in the mall parking lot.
Tough as he may be, I still suspect that if he ever accidentally skydives through the skylight into our house, Bear will probably starve to death.
In any case, it’s tough to find Bear on TV lately because the Discovery Channel plays “MythBusters” twenty-three hours a day. MythBusters is a show that carefully and methodically attempts to shatter the myth that tough guys shouldn’t wear berets, continuing Rerun’s ground-breaking work from “What’s Happening!!”
Actually, the MythBusters do perform some interesting experiments. In the most recent episode, they proved, by building a gelatin mold of an average-sized human male and welding coat hangers to a SCUBA tank on its back, that Achilles’s heel was actually his crotch. They have also proven that Zeus did not throw thunderbolts, because there’s no such thing as a bolt of thunder. Those guys know how to bust a myth.
Also, if you were just puttering along like I was, wondering how Howie Mandel got back on TV again, you may not have noticed that they changed the rules about punctuating the possessive form of words that end with the letter S. When I was a kid, we learned about Achilles’ heel. Now it’s Achilles’s heel. I didn’t know that grammar was allowed to change, and it’s frankly a little unsettling. The second comma in a list of three items has also met its demise. I think that one is the fault of the British woman who wrote a book about panda bears called “Eats, shoots and leaves.”
You don’t see physicists running around changing the laws of thermodynamics on us. “Okay, everybody, we changed our minds. Energy can be destroyed now.” That just wouldn’t be fair. It’s tough enough to learn things once. If you learn it in second grade, it should be true forever. Also, it would be cool if ice cream cones were still be thirty-five cents.
You can start a fire using only birch bark, Mike Todd and a lighter online at mikectodd@gmail.com.
[Note: Apparently, there's still some disagreement about the apostrophe thing, so there's no need to rap my knuckles with your APA handbook. Some sources say it's okay to say it like Achilles's, while others suggest that I'm a complete tool for even bringing it up.]
Guitar Hero II replicates the feeling of playing the guitar in front of a fickle but easily excitable crowd, requiring you to become embarrassingly proficient at punching the big colorful buttons that represent a guitar’s frets while you strum a switch that serves as the strings and pull down the blinds that serve to keep the neighbors from seeing you.
While it’s awfully fun, there’s something about wailing away on that plastic guitar that seems eerily reminiscent of the little plastic Fisher Price lawn mower that I had when I was a kid, the one that went poppity-pop-pop when pushed across the kitchen floor.
“Wook at me, Daddy! I’m mowing the wawn! And shwedding out some ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Woses. Wock on, dude.”
But now I can add “Pretty good at playing a pretend guitar” to my resume of useless skills, right under “Can sometimes catch things behind my back” and “Used to know how to play Chinese checkers.” Incidentally, in China, they call that game “Marble Receptacle.”
The saddest thing about being a wannabe fake guitarist is that there’s a very real guitar sitting in my basement, its case acting as more of a sarcophagus. That guitar has seen less sunlight in the past two years than Dracula or Dick Cheney. I swear I’m going to start playing that thing again one of these days, but really, what’s the point of playing the guitar after you’re married? All the motivation is gone. You’ve already got a groupie for life.
My groupie is also quite a talented fake guitarist. This is the first video game she’s ever really enjoyed. Now I’m regularly greeted by riffs from the Allman Brothers and Black Sabbath when I walk into the living room, as Kara rocks back and forth and says things like, “Aw, yeah, who’s the man?”
It’s odd to find her playing video games of her own accord. I’m not sure quite how to react to this behavior. She’d probably feel the same way if I suddenly picked up an interest in, say, painting toenails. We’d certainly have more common experiences to talk about, but would she have to worry that I’d start hogging all the little foam toe separator thingies?
Regardless, it’s too bad kids don’t learn how to play guitar in school. Rocking out is much more useful than fractions. When I was in the fourth grade, I chose to learn the trumpet because it seemed like the coolest choice. I pictured myself playing in a Dixieland band on a riverboat somewhere. But there aren’t that many riverboats in suburban Philadelphia, at least none that I could bike to. And the world just doesn’t need that many bad trumpeters. Ska isn’t even cool anymore, and I never once scored a date because I could play the theme song to Indiana Jones at a volume that would knock books off a shelf.
I should have at least picked the drums. Choosing an instrument is just too big a decision to place with someone who consumes Jell-o through a straw just because it sounds funnier that way.
You can trash a hotel room with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.
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