January 2010

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Confession #1

January 24, 2010 | 4 comments

I confess. I like the Miley Cyrus song, “The Climb.” I’m a man, in my 40s, admitting to liking a song by a teenage Disney phenom. You gotta a problem with that!?

[I’ll pause here, to give you time to laugh and point your fingers in ridicule.]

You done? OK.

It’s not necessarily the musicality or the delivery or the quality of the singing. I don’t know from stuff like that. My wife is a singer and after her I can’t hear anyone else. Wait, that didn’t sound right. I don’t mean because she’s loud. I mean because for me, no one else’s voice could ever compare. That’s what I mean.
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Swim Fear

January 17, 2010 | No comments

At the beginning of last summer, our son could not swim. It’s not that he wouldn’t get in the water or didn’t have a blind enthusiasm for getting wet. But if he wasn’t holding on to his mom or me, or us to him, he would drop to the bottom of the pool faster than a bowling ball coated in Crisco (That’s a theoretical observation. We never actually tested it with our son.)

As a kid (at least according to Mom History), I was a fish. I went straight from womb to swimming pool. My tan was so deep, it would be considered child abuse today (hey, it was the 70s).

The fact that Squirts (don’t worry, that’s not the name on his birth certificate) was three-and-a-half-years old, the end of summer was near and he still hadn’t learned to swim naturally made me feel like a neglectful father. It’s not his fault either. We’d barely given him the opportunity to try. We don’t have a swimming pool of our own, and our summer schedule hadn’t allowed us to visit our community pool even one time.
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Fortune tellers, psychics and crystal balls

January 10, 2010 | 14 comments

Here’s why I don’t believe in fortune tellers, psychics or crystal balls:

  1. Why would a fortune teller spend a lifetime working from a shanty, with a hand painted sign on the edge of the highway when she could apply her skills to play the pick 6 and upgrade to a nice strip mall with professional signage at the edge of a rapidly sprawling suburb?
  2. The little pointer on my Ouija board never moved.
  3. If you could really read my future, you’d be able to charge me a lot more than $9.99 for the first three minutes and 99 cents for each minute thereafter with a ten minute minimum and results not guaranteed. (I won’t fall for that again!)
  4. The eyes. They always have crazy eyes.
  5. My third grade Sunday school teacher told me not to.
  6. There’s no way anyone could have predicted the path my life has taken over the past ten years.

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