And Father of the Year Goes To...

So, on Monday, I told you about how I sucked it up and started coaching my little boy's soccer team. For most of the year, only nine of the ten kids on the team have shown up to play. The tenth happens to be a classmate of my son's, so I knew that he was in Nicaragua. I thought they were there for missionary work (and they might have been), but it turns out that the kid's mom is doing research on various strains of rotavirus, and there's something unique about the population in Nicaragua that makes the work interesting.

Because nothing screams "interest" like little kids shitting themselves days and nights.

I learned all this on the first night that they were back and at soccer practice. After practice was over, this guy kept talking and talking and talking and talking to me. I just wanted to get to Wendy's so I could buy the kids (and, perhaps, myself) a Frosty. Finally...an hour after practice was over...I was on my quest for the Frostys.

Since the Easter holiday fell in the middle of the soccer schedule, they did not have any games that weekend but resumed the following weekend. However, there was an event at the school where the fields are, and so the Saturday games got moved to Sunday, and some of the older kids' leagues were played on Friday night. Stick with me here; this is backstory.

Unfortunately, since I'm the coach, my phone number is listed as the contact. This means that any of the parents can call me. So, Sunday morning before the game, I'm slumbering away. My wife was out of town, so I had stayed up late the night before...reading...and...not...playing video games.

The phone rings, and it's this guy from the soccer team, who spent half the season in Nicaragua. Worse, it's not even 9:00 yet! You can imagine my frame of mind at the time when my daughter brought me the phone.

The guy was calling me to tell me that his son wouldn't be at the game that day. The game that wasn't being played until 1:00 in the afternoon. Color me unamused, dude; this is news that could have waited until at least eleven o'clock. The reason why his son wouldn't be playing? The little guy broke his arm.

I reacted appropriately. "Oh no! That's terrible! I hope he's going to be alright! Is he feeling okay?"

Now, at this point, right here, they guy should have said "Yeah, he's good. He's a little trooper. He'll soldier on through." Things would have been cool.

Instead, this guy proceeds to tell me the story of how his son broke his arm. Turns out, his older daughter had a game on Friday night, so while she was playing, this guy and his son were messing around on one of the other practice fields. His son was playing goalie, and his was kicking the ball at him.

I think you can see where this is going.

Apparently, this guy drilled kicked the ball so hard so that it hit his son with the force of a meteor striking the Earth in such a manner that he just happened to break two bones in his wrist.

Buh?

And then the guy laughed. Like, "Heh heh. Isn't that just the darnedest thing?"

I'm still like Buh? Maybe I didn't hear this correctly. I've had...a few hours sleep...since I was up late...reading...and...not...playing video games...and my head is a little foggy. Did this guy just call me up and tell me that he broke his son's arm by kicking a soccer ball at him? And then try to laugh it off?

Why, yes. Yes, he did.

Now, I played goalie. I've had the ball drilled at me where I'm pretty sure a sonic boom accompanied the shot. I've had the ball hit me so hard it hurt and I wanted to fall on the ground like the pansy-ass that I am, and bawl my eyes out. Never, however, have I ever broken a fucking bone in my wrist, arm, ribcage or anywhere else from a soccer ball hitting me. Those things have give to them! How the hell hard do you have to kick a ball--at your own six-year-old son--to break not just one but two fucking bones in his wrist?

That's not the best part of it, though. Apparently, when the ball connected with the son's arm, the son fell to the ground screaming in agony. And what does his dad do? Picks him up, ignores the kid's cries of pain, and watches the rest of his daughter's game. The whole time--according to the story--the kid is whimpering in pain. They go home. They eat dinner. They go to bed. Finally, the next day, after the kid gets up and complains about the wrist still hurting, they go to Urgent Care for x-rays.

Jesus Christ, dude, at least Darth Vader tossed Palpatine down the shaft after a couple of seconds of the blue lightning. You let your kid suffer for twelve hours or so.


And this guy just chuckles about it. Heh heh. Well, what do you know?

At this point, I've kind of tuned him out. I really don't want to listen to this guy chat me up. So, after giving me the rundown of his son's injury, he then begins to talk soccer strategy with me, since hr won't be at the game. Because, you know, I haven't handled the team for the first six weeks of the year.

Insert annoyed eyeroll here...

There are two kids on the team, David and Michael, who are very, very good players. Michael even has slide tackling down almost perfectly, but this guy wanted me to stop him from doing that. He shouldn't be doing that in this league, Mr. Smasher of Wrists tells me. My response was, "The kid has a talent. I'm not going to tell him not to use it."

He then went and lectured me on not letting David and Michael play in the game together at the same time. So, at this point, I was already confused, pissed off and a little bit perplexed by this conversation. And I was thinking, "Wait, you want me to not use my two best players in order to...you know...win the games?" As he was rambling on, I was thinking about anything else. Finally, there was a pause and I finished the conversation with "Well, I should get the kids their breakfast. Sorry about your son's arm. Don't worry about bringing him to practice for a couple of weeks. Bye."

Sweet Jesus. The only good thing, though, was that I suddenly didn't feel so bad about yelling at my kids to clean their rooms. I might get annoyed and frustrated with them, but I've never broken any bones in their arms. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Perhaps I might just win that Father of the Year trophy yet!

Trouble in Paradise

This is the most wonderful time of the year.

Well...normally, that is. It's the most wonderful time of the year if your favorite basketball team doesn't suck. In situations such as the past two seasons, I guess I can always claim to be a fan of Butler, right? *shifty-eyed*

Anyway, I've got some trouble around these here parts.

Basketball-related trouble.

I've raised my daughter right. She loves basketball. She might not be the voracious connoisseur that I am (what's this? Siena versus Fairfield? Sign me up!), but she has an appreciation for watching the game. And that makes me smile.

However, she's also decided that she's going to root for one of the local teams. And by local, I mean local. My daughter is a self-proclaimed Duke fan.

*chokes down bile*

My son, who is only 5 and doesn't know any better, and who wants desperately to have something in common with his older sister, aside from 50% of his DNA and a passion for Legos, is also a Duke fan.

In order to focus on the silver lining in light of this new-found catastrophe, I keep chanting to myself "At least it's not State...at least it's not State..."

I mean, I guess it makes sense, given where we live and all. I do drive past the campus every day--twice!--and my first "real" job was at a biotech company that was, essentially, a glorified research lab backed by a professor at Duke.

Saturday evening, when UNC decided not to even bother showing up to play visited Duke, I was a good father and let her stay up to watch the first half of the game. She sat on my bed and cheered for Duke and celebrated as they built a 30-point lead before halftime.

And then she said the most brilliant--and inadvertently the most ironically hilarious--thing I've ever heard her say:

"Wow. Duke doesn't get called for travels very often."

She also loves playing basketball, and though my backyard isn't the greatest place to shoot hoops, it beats not having anywhere to play at all.

The past two nights, it's been nice enough to go outside and shoot some hoops together. I've been trying to improve her shot a lot over the past couple of days. She's gotten stronger, so now she doesn't just shoot bunnies, but actually is developing a mid-range jumper. However, I'm trying to get her to put some more arc on the ball, and give her some good shooting form. You know, shoulders square to the basket, hips firmly underneath you, bend your knees, keep your toes pointed toward the basket, keep your feet apart.

It's this last part that she doesn't want to do most often. So, I keep telling her "Pull your legs apart", "Spread your legs", "Feet apart".

The irony of what I am saying is not lost on me.

As her game continues to grow farther and farther away from the hoop, she's been getting a bit more...cocky...as she's consistently knocking down shots from farther out. She wanted to know where the 3-point line would be, so I stepped off approximately 19 feet for her.

"Wow! That's really far away." Then she paused. "You couldn't hit that shot."

Never one to back down from the challenge of an 8-year-old girl, I said, "Give me the ball."

In what could possibly be the highlight of my basketball career, I turned and buried the shot. Nothing but net. It was, easily (and sadly) the most badass thing I've done with a basketball in the past ten years.

Because I'm not above gloating over an 8-year-old girl, I cupped my hand behind my ear and repeatedly asked, "What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything," she responded. Clearly, she was awed.

"What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything!" she insisted. Still awed, naturally.

"I think I heard you say something."

"I think dinner's ready," she responded.

All in all is all we are, I think it was a pretty constructive session. Not only have I helped her develop a bit of range to her game, but I've also taught her to ignore trash-talking assholes on the court.

And knowing is half the battle.

What the What?

So, I plop my ass down here in front of ye olde blog and, what do I find? My layout has fixed itself? Or maybe all that shit I did under the HTML editor finally worked.

Or maybe my blog is JUST THAT HAPPY that the Vikings throttled the Cowboys yesterday AND we're done looking at Marmalard Phillip Rivers for another nine months. Jesus, looking at that guy's face is like staring at a pig's asshole.

I wish I had something more to tell you. My blog was lost fucked, and now it's found fixed. Well, at least for me. And Pearl, apparently, but that might be because Pearl is made from stuff like Awesome and Fabulous and Upper Midwestern Hardiness.

Okay, so here, I'll share a little tidbitlet of a story from this past weekend. Because I am a dutiful father--and in no way am I trying to make up for laying on the couch watching football and ignoring my children all weekend--I took my daughter for another turn through the neighborhood trying to sell Girl Scout Cookies.

By the way, do you want some? I'll mail them to you. The commercials during the time outs and such on the football games this weekend told me that I can mail them for one flat rate. Email me if you want any.

So, while I'm out walking up and down the streets, alleyways and drives of my neighbors, I kept thinking of Patrick and Spongebob trying to sell chocolate to the denizens of Bikini Bottom. When anyone would come to the door and my daughter would say "Hello, I'm selling Girl Scout Cookies", it was all I could do not to scream "WE GOT 'EM NOW!!!"

But, here's the thing: We were out for about two hours early Saturday afternoon. In that span of time, we walked to about forty, maybe fifty different houses. Of those forty, maybe fifty different residences, we had five people answer their doors. Five. Five fucking people took the time to get up off their fat asses, ignore the Carolina game, and see what the young, blond girl and her dashingly handsome father wanted.

Of those five, we sold to one guy. Score! 20% success rate!

Personally, I blame Liberty Baptist Church for this. If it wasn't for those cockknockers going around, peddling their "Jesus" to people, and asking them, "If you die today, do you know where you are going?", I'm sure more folks would be willing to open the door and see what's up.

Speaking of which...*undoes belt*...those assholes are about due for another emotional scarring visit to my front porch.

Oh, hey, look: The Vikings just scored another touchdown against the Cowboys. Oh hey, look, Keith Brooking is still a whiny bitch. Boo fucking hoo, Cocksuckers.

UPDATE: Fucking thing broke again. I guess I shouldn't have run an anti-spyware scan on my computer this morning.

Bunch of savages on this internet...

Big Bronze Bison Ballsack

I took my kids to the North Carolina Zoo last Friday. This is a picture I snapped of them posing next to the giant bison sculpture that the zoo had placed near the "prairie" section of the zoo. There, they have elk and bison (buffalo) on display. Being that I love huge, shaggy, smelly beasts (incidentally, so does my wife...), this is one of my favorite parts of the zoo.

Is there any more poignant setting in the world to watch people than at a zoo? Probably, but I still made a few observations while I was there.

For instance...if your FUPA sticks out further than your boobs, a midriff shirt is not what you should be wearing. If I look over and it appears that a tub of cottage cheese is spilling over the top of your shorts, we have a problem.

If your back is so hairy that someone mistakes you for a display and tries to communicate with you using sign language (Koko want a kitty?), maybe a t-shirt would work better than that wife-beater.

And, really, while I will gladly stare at your ass as two big slices of nicely-rounded-rump are hanging out of the bottom of your shorts, this is an outfit more apt for a stage with a brass pole and mulleted guys named Randy ready and waiting to shove dollar bills into your garter belt. The zoo? Not so much.

Now, I appreciate the effort that teachers put forward. I also understand that keeping tabs on fifty rowdy children unleashed upon the hapless, captive wildlife of the zoo, but still. Could you maybe offer up a little bit of "wait yer damned turn" when the fat slob is trying to take a picture of his kids sitting in the helicopter in the African veldt display? Thanks.

Finally, one little note to the troupe of skanky teenagers watching the baboons. Um...that one that you're talking about...he's not pulling the other one's tail for play. Well, maybe for play. But not the kind of play you're talking about. He is, in fact, most decidedly not trying to wrestle with that other baboon. See...he's mounting her. For sexual pleasure. The tail pull might be a kind of baboon foreplay...it could also be a type of baboon bitch slap. I realize you might not have taken biology yet, but still. The one on the bottom wasn't screaming for the sheer joy of playing leap frog.

Yeah...we didn't stay at the baboon pen for long.

I will now direct your attention back up to the picture of my lovely children in front of the bison statue. My kids wanted their pictures taken with pretty much all of the bronze statues in the zoo. This is one of the best ones. I'm kind of proud of myself for a) remembering to bring the camera and b) not fucking the picture up too badly.

However, the story of the bronze bison doesn't stop there.

Right after we were done with the picture, my son, Tank, turned and said "Daddy! This statue has poop on it!" I didn't think much of it, but then I looked up and found him under the statue, manhandling the bison's very pronounced scrotum. "Look, Daddy! They put poop on this statue! Gross!" At this point, my daughter became interested and, she, too, was climbing under the statue to check out that big round ball of poop hanging between the bison's legs.

Clearly, this was going to be a defining moment of my parental career.

"Um, let's go look at the real bison. Maybe we can see some elk, too! Stop playing with that, and let's go!"

Yep, I took the cowardly way out. Rather than explain to him that the bison statue was a boy--and what a boy!--I did the old bait-and-switch and distract them with the promise of more animals.

Fortunately, the zoo set up some fake geysers, which completely made the kids forget about the bison statue, and the bison statue and its poo were quickly forgotten.

Constant Vigilance!

Remember back when I told you about going to see Miss Saigon in Raleigh? One of the things--aside from all the mostly-nekkid chicks grinding in front of me--that made me love the show was that it reminded me just how much I missed being on the stage. From my senior year in high school on through the end of my college career, I had been fairly active in pulling off live productions on the stage. Whether it was plays, musicals, one-acts or doing improv work--or even the time spent doing student-run television shows--I've had an active career in the dramatic arts.

And, now that I'm out of it, I miss it.

So, I've found a way to get past this: reading to my children.

Shortly after the Miss Saigon viewing, I started reading The Tale of Despereaux to my kids. The good thing about Despereaux (the book, not the movie--the movie is an abortion of the story) is that most of the characters (since it's written for kids) are achetypes. So, it was pretty easy to get into character by varying my voices. And once I started getting into character, well, then I felt like that piece of me that void in my life that had formed since I left the stage had been partially filled.

And, honestly, it was fun. The voices were easy to create: Miggory Sow had a heavy, gravelly, cockney accent; Roscuro had a slimy, evil, plotting voice dripping with vile and revenge; Despereaux had a soft English accent; Despereaux's brother had a bit heavier English accent; Despereaux's father had an even heavier English accent; Despereaux's mother had an over-the-top dramatic French accent. And so on.

Well, we finished Despereaux months ago, and, well, I've had to find other ways to work this stage-presence-cum-narrator persona. For some reason, the same Thomas the Tank Engine books over and over again don't work quite as well, though my son has decided to begin with the Magic Treehouse Books. Again, the characters are largely the same, and therefore don't really offer much of a creative outlet.

Fortunately, my daughter is having me read her the Harry Potter books.

Since most of you are familiar, I won't have to rehash the wide variety and depth of characters here. A lot of the characters are easier to do than others: Hagrid's part is written for him; McGonagall's voice is slightly lilting with her words clipped; and Snape I try to do my best Alan Rickman because, seriously, it's Alan Fucking Rickman.

So, we're currently working our way through Goblet of Fire, and last night we got through the first Defense Against the Dark Arts class. In case you've forgotten, this is where Mad-Eye Moody shows the class the Unforgivable Curses and how to prepare for them. The best preparation for the Unforgivable Curses? CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

Now, when I do Moody's voice, I give him a gravelly sort of voice, lower and rougher than my normal reading voice. It's not quite Christian Bale doing Batman, but it does convey a bit of the crotchety old man that is Mad-Eye Moody.

So, last night, I'm going along, reading away and my daughter is flipping through an American Girl magazine looking at the pictures. She's listening, but she doesn't know what to expect. When we get to the proper place, I fire off a loud, booming "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" I thought she would jump out of her skin! It was so entertaining to have her jump, catch her breath, and then stare at me with those big, blue eyes that convey the question "What the fuck was that?" oh so well.

We continue reading, and she lets her guard down and goes back to flipping through her magazine (she's a multi-tasker, that one). We come to it again. "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" I roar. Again, the same satisfying jump, the same satisfying "What the fuck was that?" stare.

Finally, we come to a break, and I close up the book and she's like, "Is there going to be much more of that, with Moody shouting and all?" she asks as I'm tucking her in.

"There might be," I said, bending down to kiss her pure, sweet, angelic forehead. "You know what the best way to prepare for the yelling is, though, right?" I ask her.

"What?" she says, her face the very picture of angelic charm.

"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" I roar once more.

I thought sure she was going to wet herself the third time.

Parenting skillz: I has 'em.