Five Months Report

Here's what we do at home, courtesy of crappy cellphone camera:

We eat


The first peas didn't go so well. He puked green, which made me think the evil demons were leaving his body. Then I remembered it had to be the peas. It's cool now.


Actually, the other day I was doing that ol' "One for daddy... one for mommy... one for grandma..." And then I realized it was wrong, that I was sending us both on the irreversible path of using food as emotional blackmail. So instead, I told him if he had one more bite his balls would get bigger. And they did.

We bath


I'm getting the hang of that one. It's actually kind of fun.

We chat

We contemplate



We play


His mom had to overcome her clownophobia to put him there.

I had to overcome my don'ttouchmycomputerphobia to put him there.

We drink!


We put pants on our heads



We punch each other in the face

I Had a Journal When It Was Still Cool to Have One

I had a journal when I was eight years old. 1981. The first entry talks about my parents buying a color TV. Not the first people in the building but thankfully not the last. The second entry talks about a phone call in the middle of the night and my father telling us his uncle was dead. I cried myself to sleep.

Then comes this little fun story. A few of us were playing soccer for a while. Then, a young couple sat on a bench overlooking the field, and started making out. One by one, we left the game and moved to the bench next to the couple. I don’t remember that but I’m sure it happened because I made a drawing of two stick figures on a bench, and the man’s thin stick-figure hand reaches out for the two circles in the middle of the woman-stick-figure’s body.

Then I have a movie review. My mom took my sister and me to see Les Miserables (the Anthony Perkins version), and for about ten pages I retold the story of Jean Valjean. The color TV was a page and a half, my first encounter with death was about a page, and so was my first encounter with the glory of boobies. And a retelling of Les Miserables was ten pages. I needed an editor.

I probably still do.

The diary lasted a month, and then, like in so many other instances, I moved on. Maybe my parents bought me the Commodore 64, or maybe I ran out of pages and didn’t think of asking for another notebook, but there end my written childhood memories.

I'm Going Through the Change

I read a post about the Baltimore Aquarium, and the woman was complaining about all the soccer moms pushing strollers, and I thought, you fuck, it's cute that you changed moms into soccer moms just because it's supposedly an offensive term, like Liberal, but if they're soccer moms, doesn't it mean their kids play soccer? So what are they doing sitting on strollers in an aquarium? But I didn't leave a comment because that's stupid and I also felt weird about it all.

And then I thought about our June trip to Israel, and I suddenly remembered how I used to calculate when would be the best time to avoid screaming babies on the flight…

But now, if we board the plane, and my baby starts to cry, and you give me that look, I want you to know that this baby's cry is breaking my heart and tearing my soul to pieces. And I'm sorry my child's suffering is disturbing your enjoyment of Rush Hour 3 and I'm sorry it'll stop you from setting a Sudoku record, but turn your face the fuck away from me. Punk.

And I never got baby photos. Why do people take baby photos when all babies look the same?

But God help me, this guy is special.

Irony

Three examples of irony from my search for fame and fortune. Mostly fortune.

1. The profeader

A few months ago, I wrote a post about my plan to quit my job after cutie is born and try to do some work while he learns to bond with his pacifier. I received a lot of good wishes and good suggestions, the longest and probably the most earnest came from an email from Jennifer. She is a professional blogger who, among other places, writes here, so of course I meant to follow her advice. But I didn't, because I'm a smart ass (smart arse, for my English readers). Basically, it meant that instead of concentrating my efforts on a few good leads, I spent hours on those crappy freelance bidding sites until I couldn't deal with it any more and stopped looking. At least until I get motivated again.

But that's not the irony. This is:

2. Ethics

I found this place where you can write essays and get paid, so I started filling an application, and then I got to the "How do you feel about students paying others to write their term papers?" question. So I started talking about how important it was for my personal growth to actually try to learn as much as I could and get as much as I could out of my college experience, and all that, and then it clicked...

So I left that application and I moved on to the next site. This one claimed the buyer would use my essay only as a tool to write his own essay, but it was pretty much the same thing . Only more ironic:

3. Digg

I decided to try that whole domaining thing all the big boys were talking about. So I went on a GoDaddy shopping spree and bought politicartoons.com, and I forwarded it to a Blogger site, and I put a little AdSense. Now all I had to do was put some political cartoons, and I was set!

But I don't know anything about copyrights, and Honey was busy feeding the little guy, and I just wanted to put something on there, submit it to Digg to feel I've accomplished something, and get some sleep.

But I can't draw.

So I have a site about political cartoons, but I can't put others' cartoons there, and I can't draw, so what the hell am I supposed to do?

And then I thought I might as well just put a Hillary picture up, add some lines using Microsoft Paint (because I don't know how to use Photoshop), post the result on the site, and submit the image to Digg, including a little signature that will hopefully get some people to the site.

And how cute is that? Nine people Dugg it already (here). That's more than anything I've ever written on this site. I spill blood and guts trying to come up with meaningful stuff, and maybe one person will do me a favor and Digg it. But I use Paint to put some words over a picture, and all of a sudden I'm a cartoonist.

The Goddesses

One day, when I was about ten, I think, we visited my grandmother, who lived on the third floor in a small rundown apartment building in Tel Aviv. These were changing times in her neighborhood. When my grandparents moved in, it was a neighborhood of middle-aged Eastern European immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors. Then, with time, the older people moved out of the neighborhood or out of the world, and suddenly my grandma’s house was located in the hippest part of the city.

That’s just a bit of background to explain how come when I was ten I looked out of my grandma’s bathroom window and saw on the second floor of the building next door two young women getting undressed.

It was amazing. They took their time getting undressed and then dressed again, moving from one room to another to try out various clothes, then taking them off again, checking themselves in the mirror, talking to each other naked.

Meanwhile, my grandma was yelling at my mother in French, and my mother, in turn, was asking me to stop running around the house. But I didn’t care. The women were moving from one room to another, so I had to do the same.

Then, when they finished getting dressed, they were no longer goddesses. They became just two women; two adults.

It reminds me of my girlfriend when I was sixteen. I remember the last time she put her shirt on while telling me we were through. I remember, button by button, how she changed from being my girlfriend to being just another person in this big world. With her clothes on, she was now someone who would no longer affect my life, other than through memories of youthful intimacy. And it felt weird, the way a few buttons made all the difference.

A year later, she sent me an anonymous love letter, but that’s another story.