Happy Brithday To Me

So, today is my birthday. Starting today I have to start saying that I'm 43. It just sounds like a dumb age to be.

There are just certain years in your life that sound dumb. Certain ages where it just seems unlikely that something good will happen. Aside from 13, most of 3 ages. 23 and 33 are kind of stupid, but once you get into 43, 53, 63, etc. they just really seem bad. I mean, Paul McCartney didn't write a song called "When I'm 63," now did he?

There are other ones as well. 37 is idiotic. 26 isn't much better. Oddly, 19 is pretty stupid, too. It sounds like a cereal. It's a year of cereal. 59 doesn't sound great either. And, I'm pretty sure that 47 will be another wasted year.

It's not so much the sound of the age -- although that is part of it -- its more about what seem to be dead spots in everyone's life. How many times have you read an interview where the subject said something like, "Well, I wrote my famous novel when I was 43"? Or, "I climbed Mount Everest when I was 26"?

I'm sure stuff like that happens, but it just doesn't seem common. Lots of stuff happens at certain ages. 27 and 28 seem particularly big for both good and bad. 34 has a lot going on. People do things at those ages. But then there are those other times when you're just alive and that's about it.

Maybe since I've frequently not always had quite as much success on the "big" years, I'll get to be one of the oddballs that does do something great in their 43rd year. At least I can try telling my self that so that I can sleep for the next few nights until I just resign myself to spending the next 12 months drooling and twiddling my thumbs.

Flashing

I was supposed to be part of a flash mob today, but I was the only one that showed up. That was kind of awkward. On the plus side, I did make $20 in change from people that thought I was just a street performer.

It wasn't quite what I had envisioned, especially after the rehearsals. Dancing to Justin Beiber's "Baby" without the other 599 Beliebers made me look, I don't know, creepy.

I am now wondering if maybe I had the date wrong. It did always seem odd that it was on Easter Sunday, but I thought maybe that was just part of the whole spectacle. Probably should've texted someone.

Speaking of Easter, maybe it's only after you have children that you think about these things, but who the heck decided that candy was part of Easter. By 8 a.m., my two sons had already eaten 50 jelly beans, the ears off of four different chocolate rabbits, seven peanut butter eggs, 12 marshmallow peeps and 27 malted milk ball eggs. Oh sure, I know what you're thinking - "Well, what kind of parent are you? Who lets their kids eat all of that?" Easy for you to say...once that first burst of sugar energy kicks in, I don't go near those kids. I go hide and wait for them to come crashing down. If that makes me a bad parent then so be it. Judge all you want.

But, really, where did the candy part come from? Of course, I could just look it up on Wikipedia, but I find it kind of curious that I don't know this. I know the story behind treats at Halloween. Maybe the Easter candy has some kind of similar pagan origin. I mean, I get the eggs and flowers and all the other stuff that amounts to birth, rebirth, circle of life and all of that. No idea what candy has to do with it.

Maybe it's one of those deals like fish on Friday. "Oh, from now on you can't eat meat on Friday," the Pope said. "Why, Your Excellency?," his staff asked. "Because I'm taking a bath on my fish mongering business. Now, get out there an push the halibut."

Perhaps at some point in history there was some swing away from eating candy. Maybe carrot sticks had just been discovered and they became such a snacking craze that candy shops and soda fountains were suddenly deserted and dropping like flies. Then someone started spreading a rumor that dessert at the Last Supper had involved a chocolate bunny and, viola, suddenly every sap around has to have one for his kid on Easter.

In any case, it's now just some big scam that leads to me spending way too much money and my kids bouncing up and down like Mexican jumping beans for the better part of two days. (On a side note, it must really suck to be a teacher the day after Easter and Halloween.)

Good Friday

Marty: I don't have to go to school because of Good Friday.

Me: Do you know what Good Friday actually is?

Marty: I don't remember.

Me: It represents the day that Jesus died.

Marty: Oh...I guess I'm going to have to watch that Jesus movie (Jesus Christ Superstar) after all. I'm just not that into the Holy Bible.

Me: So you've said. Why is that again?

Marty: There's just too much killing and stuff like that in it.

Me: But there's other stuff...parts about love and compassion and you always say that you like that stuff.

Marty: Yeah, but I guess I'm just not that much of a romantic.

Me: First off, that's not true. You're absolutely a romantic. But, besides that, the Bible really isn't about romance. There really aren't that many romantic parts...other than some parts are poetic.

Marty: I still don't like romance.

Me: Fine. What do you like?

Marty (smiling): Comedy!

I actually had a fleeting thought about trying to explain "The Life of Brian" to my 8-years-old son before thinking better of it (although, I do firmly believe that at some point in his life I will find him singing, "Bright Side of Life").

Later on, the kids watched "It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown!" complete with their own commentary. Stuff like..."How come Snoopy's the only one that understands Woodstock?," "How did Woodstock get an invisible elevator?," "Where did the bird furniture come from?," "How did Snoopy even get in there with the bunnies, anyway?," "Why is Marcie so dumb?"

I'm not sure that we're doing a proper job of explaining this holiday to our children, but we have some enlightening conversations.

Busy, Busy

I've become one of those obnoxiously busy people...and I don't think that I really meant to do it. Time was that I would go to work and then come home. Maybe I had a writing project going on that I would work on for a couple of hours in the evening, but that was about it.

Now, I seem to have jam-packed my days to the point that I barely know what's going on. I work full-time managing a staffing company (which I don't enjoy, but it pays well)...part-time covering high school sports for a newspaper (which I do enjoy, but the pay sucks)...and then I help run a community theater (which I kind of enjoy and don't get paid at all for).

Add on to that the, you know, kids stuff of soccer and t-ball and school and homework...and being married and having a house and a dog and two cats...and by the end of the day, I usually am so far behind on everything that there's no real hope of getting caught up.

Here's the thing though...whenever someone tells me how busy they are, I usually hear them turning this or that down. "Oh, I would love to help, but I have to do so-and-so," they'll say. My problem is that I never seem to manage to turn anything down...much to the consternation of my wife.

I want to say no...I really do. But, then thanks to that Catholic school influence of my formative years, I end up feeling guilty, so I end up agreeing to do whatever it is that someone wants. I really need to figure out how to change that, because a whole lot of stuff that I do are things that I don't want to do.

Otherwise, I'm going to end up dying with an 800-page "To Do" list.

Quipster

Yesterday, after Marty's first soccer game, which was played in a steady rain, heavy wind and temperatures in the 40's, he came off the field crying in pain because his frozen hands hurt. After he called down and we were walking towards the car, he looked at me and said, "I hope our next game is on a 'Sun'-day." I looked at his grinning face, and he just said, "Get it?"

"Get it?," is Marty's favorite phrase. He punctuates many, many sentences with it.

Earlier today, I asked him what he was doing. The response was, "I'm just trying to make a living here."

Sometimes, talking to him is like talking to that robot from the '80's Guttenberg movie, "Short Circuit," where it just repeats phrases that it heard on television. Marty not only quotes movies, TV shows and commercials, he's also an advertisers dream when it comes to the power of suggestion. It doesn't have to even be a commercial. When he was watching the Black Eyed Peas on the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, suddenly he went, "Do we have any apple juice?" (I'm not sure that's what apl.de.ap was going for with the name, but he might want to consider a deal with Mott's.) We were driving in Chicago one time and he started asking me about Mackinaw Island...after about two minutes I noticed the name of the street we were on was Mackinaw.

He's been this way for a while. A couple of years ago, Amy tried to tell him that his godmother was getting married. "Welcome to my world," he said. "What does that mean?," she said. Casey, who would've been three, said, "It means, welcome to my world," before adding, "I don't have any hair." With sad, world weary eyes, Marty looked at Amy again, shook his head and said, "Welcome to my world."

A little later that day, he decided to ask more about the wedding and as he was having it explained to him, Amy mentioned that when a man marries your aunt, he becomes your uncle. "Like Uncle Bob?," Marty asked. When he was told that was not quite right, but sort of, he responeded, "No, thank you. I don't want another uncle."

Amy never did bother explaining the fact that he already had multiple uncles before that and for all we know, he still believes that there's only his favorite uncle...and that's it.

Sure, it confuses other kids when he randomly quotes Daffy Duck cartoons. Heck, he confuses other kids with out of context quotes from Spongebob Squarepants. But, maybe he's just working on his craft.

A few years ago, we got back his school picture...which looked eerily similar to "The Kramer," the portrait of Kramer in the Seinfeld episode. I asked him why he had looked like that. He said, "Well, I was going for scared, but it ended up coming out as sad." He took the picture and looked at it again. "I've got to work on my scared," he said, and walked away.

Dress Code

The other day, I looked outside to see Marty walking around our yard wearing a hoodie, swimming goggles and snow boots...and it was 70-degrees outside.

Casey insists on wearing his cowboy boots around, even if he's wearing shorts, and frequently tucks his pants into them. That's just not in our yard...that's any place.

Last night, Marty went walking through our living room with pants on his head. When I relayed that to Amy, all she wanted was an assurance that he was wearing pants over the appropriate body parts (he was...still not sure where the extra pair on his head came from).

I don't know what the deal is with them. Casey -- who insists on wearing a tie to every picture day -- when allowed to dress himself, will pick the loudest outfit that he can possibly find. Marty would walk around dressed in costumes all the time if we would allow it.

And, I'm not sure that it's going to get any better. After seeing a reference to Mr. T in a comic strip, the boys asked who that was. Upon being shown a picture, Casey exclaimed, "He looks awesome!"

Religion

I have an odd thing going on when it comes to religion and my sons. For starters, we're not really raising them in a religion. Both Amy and I were born and raised Catholics. We were married in a Catholic church and both of the boys were baptised Catholic.

Now, since some time during my grade school years of going to Catholic school, I've been pretty laissez faire about religion. When I was really young, I was very much into it...and had my mother reminding me that it would be pretty awesome if I grew up to be a priest. Even before hitting the teen years and finding out that my enjoyment of sex was (supposedly) a deal breaker, I had already ruled the profession out. That happened when I realized that most every priest that I knew was pretty much a hypocrite (with a few exceptions).

At one point, my crazy 6-foot-8 brother went on a religious kick and dragged me around with him as he "experimented" with religion. The downside is that eventually his craziness led him to some kind of Christian cult and I had to deal with some crazy people hanging around the house for about six months. The upside was that I got exposed to a number of different religions and churches...and got to see that they all have holes in their dogma. From that point on, I stopped worrying too much about organized religion and just kind of went by what I was thought was right.

In actuality, I'm more or less an agnostic. I'm not good at having faith. However, I'm also a perpetual waffler, so I don't want to not have faith. Since I didn't see another religion that made much more sense to me, I just stuck with the one from my childhood.

Amy was the one that was the more religious out of the two of us...but then life happened and she started questioning some things and, well, she became a little more like me than she probably ever planned to.

Which has led to some confusion with our kids. With two lapsed Catholics as parents, the boys then went to a Lutheran church's day care. Then they moved into a home daycare where they have been exposed to a group of people that go to the same church.

This has led to them picking up only some parts of the whole religion scene. That leads to things like Marty telling me that one night that he doesn't like the Bible. I had to ask for more information. His reasoning was that there's a lot of violence in the Bible, a lot of killing and people doing bad things to each other, and he doesn't like that. I asked him about the other parts...the parts about love and compassion. "Well, I do like those parts...but I don't like the others."

That might not sound like that big of a deal, but in a small Christian town, telling people that you've decided to pick and choose what parts of the Bible you want to believe in can be a bit of an issue.

He also has decided to add some religion to his scientific beliefs, which can be interesting. He'll be relaying some facts that he's learned about the changes to Earth over the billions of years and then just randomly throw God into that. One time, he was asking me about how the Earth had changed to have the atmosphere that sustains life. I told him that different people have different theories about how it happened and addied that some people just believe that God did it. "I'll just go with the God one," he said.

Casey on the other hand has an absolute belief in whatever it is that he believes in. We don't really know what he believes in. Unlike his deep thinking brother, Casey doesn't bother discussing such things. But, rest assured that he is absolutely sure that whatever he chooses to believe in is right. That might be why he was voted in preshchool, "Most Likely to Have a Messiah Complex."

Crackberry

While I've been out of town on a short family vacation, I have taken great pains to cut myself off from my normal routine of checking my Blackberry non-stop.

I haven't checked sports scores, I haven't looked at any new uploads on "Funny or Die," I haven't looked at Facebook. I have limited my checking of e-mail for my day job or the theatre to once a day (I'm too paranoid to cut if off entirely).

I feel a little disconnected and a little off-balance. I'm enjoying myself, but say, when I actually didn't bring my Blackberry with me to a museum it did feel like I was missing a part of me. And, then it turned out that I actually needed the phone part of it because Casey and I got separated from Marty and Amy. As it happens, in the age of cell phones, people don't pick meeting places any more like they did when I was a kid. It only took 3 hours to find them, which I didn't think was that much of an issue, but I was alone in that belief.

I tried to ignore all phone calls as well...but then someone got seriously injured at my day job and I ended up on the phone trying to provide some direction for the situation whether I wanted to or not.

Of course, the boys haven't notice that I don't have my Blackberry, nor do they care. They don't like my phone...not because any reason like it takes my attention away from them or anything...they just don't like it as a device. Usually they'll ask to see my phone and then poke fruitlessly at the screen before regarding it with contempt, saying, "Oh, yeah, this is your phone," and handing it back to me...before setting off to find an iPhone.

Dog Jokes

The other day Marty was at the dining room table and said something about dog jokes. So, I gave him, "Why did the dog have to take a nap after chasing the truck?"

"He was tired?" Amy said.

"He was exhausted," I corrected.

I then told Marty the timeless classic about the guy that goes into the bar with a dog and says, "My dog can talk. Give me a drink and I'll prove it." The bartender pours him a drink and says, "Alright, let's see."

The guys looks at the dog and says, "What's on the top of a house?"

"Roof," says the dog.

"What's the opposite of smooth?," he prompts the dog.

"Rough," barks the dog.

"Who was the greatest baseball player in history?" he asks, with a wink towards the bartender.

"Ruth!" the dog says.

The bartender grabs them both by the collar and tosses them into the street. As the guy rubs his neck, the dog looks at him and says, "Maybe I should've said DiMaggio?"

Well, I just heard Marty repeating the joke...and he nailed it. Still has absolutely no idea who Joe DiMaggio is, and only sort of knows who Babe Ruth is because of an old advertising sign in our house, but he pronounced the name right.

That's my legacy to my son...teaching him hack comic jokes. Next I'm going to give him a routine about Ovaltine.

Someday, he'll be all set for the resurgence of the Catskills.

Insults!

My sons had on some Disney Channel thing that was showing the Jonas Brothers being chased around by a pack of girls. I said, "I'm that popular with girls."

"Really?" Casey said.

"Really?" Marty said. "Why?"

"Because girls love bald heads," I said.

"I don't think that bald headed guys are that adored by anyone," Marty said.