Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation

RENTON, WA—Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that will reportedly put the 12-year-old girl hopelessly out of touch with her generation.

Perusing his music and film collections and showing reporters distinctive, well-regarded works that will thoroughly alienate Emma from her sixth-grade classmates, Campbell said he wanted to make sure his daughter enjoyed the benefits of a cultural education he never received at her age.

“Back then, I listened to junk like Journey and watched crappy movies like Iron Eagle,” the 41-year-old said in reference to popular music and films of the 1980s that allowed him to have something to talk about with friends. “I wish my own dad had turned me on to the good stuff, so I wouldn’t have had to wait until I was in my 20s before I started digging anything halfway decent.”

“Well, I’m not making the same mistake he did,” Campbell continued as he pulled out vinyl copies of Television’s Marquee Moon, Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain, and Big Star’s #1 Record, highly influential albums that will in no way help his daughter interact with her peers at a particularly delicate time in her social development. “There’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and it’s never too early to start learning what’s worth your time. I’m just glad I have the know-how to guide her.”

So what are they saying? That me putting the Pixies 1991 Brixton Academy performance on repeat isn’t going to make Nate a high school chick magnet? Maybe. Maybe not. But that one emo girl in his art class is going to freakin’ love him.

All (in)valid concerns. But it’s worth pointing out that unsnipped American boys are becoming the norm:

Steep Drop Seen in Circumcisions in U.S.

Hospital circumcision rates are down, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report — and there doesn’t seem to be any clear reason.

The report from the center’s weekly report on morbidity and mortality showed that, depending on what numbers you used, hospital circumcision rates from 1999 to 2008 dropped from 62.5% to 56.9% (National Hospital Discharge Survey) or from 63.5% to 56.3% (Nationwide Inpatient Sample). And according to SDIHealth, from 2001 to 2010 the rates dropped from 58.4% to 54.7%.

You can read more here, here, and here.

Finally, because our previous conversations about circumcision got a wee bit contentious, I’ll leave you with a joke:

MG: Hey, did you know they use foreskins for replacing eyelids?

JG: No they don’t.

MG: Yeah, they do.

JG: Come on, really?

MG: Yeah, but afterward you tend to look a bit cock-eyed.

Internet high five for the first person who guesses who “MG” is.

What happened was I ran out of time. I’ve said very little about on this blog about what I do professionally and I will say very little more except this: it’s one of those jobs where you sit around unemployed for a year and then suddenly, completely at random it seems, someone taps you on the shoulder and offers to pay you a handsome amount of money to work your ass off for a few weeks.

So that’s the good news, that I got me a job. The bad is that quickly thereafter my routine became this: get up at 6 AM, take care of Nate until 4 PM, pass him off to Leigh Ann, eat dinner, start my “real” job, then work until midnight. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

As it were, over the last few months this blog has missed a number of Nate’s firsts. Like Nate pulling himself up to standing. And Nate getting his first tooth. And Nate saying his first syllables (“dadadadada”). Rest assured, I have not forgotten these events and will write about them in due time. That could be a couple more weeks. Maybe even longer. But look at the bright side. Every time you check this site and see that this is the most recent post, it means that Nate’s college fund has grown $1 larger.

(The rest I’m spending on heroin.)

But I’ll tell you what. If I wake up Sunday morning and a series of cataclysmic events have not ravaged the planet, and if I am I not deafened by the sound of people wailing from the depths of their agony, and if I have not myself been teleported into a fiery pit of non-believers, then I’ll start doing my homework again. Promise.

It’s an 8 minute clip and it’s worth watching in its entirety, but if you just want to see how big this tornado was, jump to the 3:35 mark.

I lived in a second floor apartment on the far side, in one of the units that no longer appears to exist. Sadly, the unit to the right of mine, where those idiots gave Maxine acid, appears to have survived.

Truth be told, the news coverage is starting to bother me. I keep seeing the same story over and over again. It goes like this: the reporter finds some survivor and asks them how they made it, and that person invariably says they sat in their basement and prayed for Jesus to save them. And then the blowhard reporter (I’m looking at you, Brian Williams) says something like, “I guess he heard you” or “It looks like it worked” or something equally as ridiculous. Look, I understand why this meme exists. People like to think that God is on their side and that they’re a part of the “chosen people” (hell, entire religions are based on this). But no one ever stops to consider what this myth does to the young woman, also in her basement, also praying to Jesus, who had her baby ripped out of her arms and then had to watch helplessly as debris traveling at 200 mph shredded her infant alive. God chose to save you but mutilate that infant? Bullshit, my friend. You lived for the same reason that baby died: random f%&#ing chance.

If you think that sounds a little harsh, consider this: half of these kooks think that baby is going to hell if it wasn’t baptized.

More next week.

Now, I realize that in this situation you expect sordid tales of Charlie Sheen-esque debauchery. Dads Gone Wild! Tiger Blood! Winning! But the truth is I was never really a hookers and blow kind of guy. The proof of that is probably that I’m sitting here, freshly showered, perky from 8 hours of sleep, having just watched 15 consecutive minutes of television, and the one thing I’m thinking is: “Man, I miss being bossed around by that little tyrant.”

Come on back, little man. Daddy’s ready to take orders

What gave me that impression? Well, (a) Frazer divulges his own disinterest in having kids and wrecking his super hip lifestyle, (b) Frazer peppers his article with less-than-neutral prose like “Unless you’re among the less than 2 percent of Americans who farm for a living and might conceivably rely on offspring for free labor, children have gone from being an economic asset to an economic liability,” and (c) Frazer includes diagrams such as the following, explaining the benefits of being a Cool Uncle instead of an Uncool Dad:

Wait, I think I get it. Having kids is bad, right? And it says something negative about my personality, doesn’t it? Well, as luck would have it, Frazer has also found an expert to testify to exactly that:

According to Laura S. Scott, who surveyed 171 subjects for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, that kind of attitude [not wanting to have kids] is linked to a specific personality component: “A lot of introverts, thinkers, judgers—these are people who think before they act,” she says. “They’re planners, and they’re not the kind of people who can be easily led into a conventional life just because everyone else is doing it.”

Ah, yes, the thinkers and judgers. I met a lot of them in the 35 years that I’ve impulsively waited to have a child. I met even more while I spontaneously accrued two different master’s degrees. I wish I could have been more like them. No, instead, I heard the call of the lame and domesticated and moved out to Hollywood, California, where jobs are easy to come by, and where I have been all-but-too-happy to settle into the time-honored conventional lifestyle of being a Stay at Home Dad, mostly because that’s what everyone else is doing too.

[silence]

Seriously, folks. You make your own choices. If you want to drink Pepsi, go ahead. If you want to root for Michigan, you can do that too. I won’t make fun of you for either. But if you want to passive-aggressively rip my decision to give another human being a chance to blow out birthday candles, or cry when his dog dies, or kiss a girl on the lips, I say poop on you.

More later. I’m headed off to Home Depot to buy 300 feet of chicken wire.

Because it was a particularly nice day – sunny, upper 70s, breezy – Leigh Ann and I decided to bring Nate to the game, and now she had him with her in the stands. Before I go any further, I should note that Leigh Ann is a FIERCE MAMA GRIZZLY when it comes to protecting our little man. To illustrate this point: you know that Grizzly Bear video Colbert uses in the Threatdown?

Well, that Bear would crap its pelt if it ran into Leigh Ann.

Anyhow, if you’re a parent you know what comes next – i.e. the moment where you let your guard down for one second. Someone in the stands asked Leigh Ann a question and she reflexively turned to answer. As she did, the batter – who I will not ridicule here for being unable to hit a ball pitched underhand – fouled the ball straight back, up and over the backstop, and on a direct trajectory for my 5-month-old son’s forehead.

Standing some 300 feet away, I watched this unfold the way you might watch a murder unfold through binoculars – unable to do anything but no less affected. Someone yelled. Another mother screamed. And Leigh Ann, by the grace of whoever invented pumpkin ice cream, turned her body just enough that the ball whizzed harmlessly by, thereby saving us both from a life of therapy.

Ho ho ho.

Later that night, I was flipping through channels. F/X was playing the movie Face/Off, which I’d heard was poop-on-a-stick-bad but had never actually seen. So, fool that I am, I watched the first scene. In it, Nicolas Cage is a hitman trying to take out John Travolta. He’s got Travolta in his rifle sites, but Mr. Saturday Night Fever is playing on a carousel with his son, so Cage is having a hard time finding an open shot. When at last he thinks he has one, Cage pulls the trigger — only the bullet goes in to Travolta’s back, out through his chest, and straight into the boy, knocking them both to the ground. Travolta spends the next few moments not crawling away for his life, but cradling his dead son’s body and crying.

It made me angry. Not because it’s a laughably over-acted scene – it is – or because John Travolta is the world’s most obvious closet case – he is – or because Nicolas Cage used to be in good movies – really, he did. No, it made me angry because it made me imagine what it would be like to cradle Nate that way. And in doing so I was suddenly and acutely aware that I now had an incredible vulnerability. And that I would always have it. And that hack directors like John Woo would be able to exploit it at their pleasure.

Luckily, the Final Four was on another channel.

It’s a pretty lucrative set up for me. For every dollar this site brings in, I get a fat $.30. Which means, for each person who subscribes to Daddy’s My Mommy for an entire year, I get one Taco Bell Fiesta Taco Salad. Sweet! Who says writers don’t look out for themselves?

p.s. What’s a Kindle?

By the way, I need to write a check for rent. What’s today’s date again?

First off, your players don’t play just on Sundays; they play every single day, so you’re always setting your lineup and checking boxscores. And where as in fantasy football you have roughly 6 positions to fill (QB, RB, TE, WR, K, DEF), in fantasy baseball you have twice as many (1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, C, DH, SP, RP), so you’ve got to be semi-familiar with 300+ players. In short, fantasy baseball requires knowledge, skill, statistical analysis, and a screw loose in your head.

Which is why I frigging love it.

It is with great regret, then, that I announce, on Opening Day 2011, that I am hereby hanging up my fantasy baseball cleats. What’s that, you say? “It’s okay, Scott. You’re doing the right thing. You’re a Dad now. You’ve got a baby to take care of. Giving up fantasy baseball is the mature decision.” Yes, yes, it is. But before you go any further, I should probably tell you that I didn’t exactly “give it up”. More like got kicked out. That’s right, the league I’ve played in for the past 3 years decided not to invite me back this year. Why? Hard to say, but it might have something to do with our last three league champions.

2008: The Fuzzy Dunlops
2009: The Fuzzy Dunlops
2010: The Fuzzy Dunlops

You know how the saying goes. “If first you don’t succeed, kick out the guy who’s beating you.”

So, anyhow, here’s to you Fuzzy Dunlops. To Albert Pujols who made still my beating heart. To Billy Butler and Dustin Pedroia who were criminally under-rated in our scoring system and acquired on the cheap by me every single year. To Matt Holliday, Nick Markakis, and Shin-Soo Choo, who made up what I liked to call the “The Outfield of Doom.” And to Joe Mauer who inflated my team batting average as if it were a hot air balloon.

I’m going to miss you boys. Good luck.

That’s right, folks. Abercrombie & Fitch is now making a padded push-up bra for seven year olds. What’s that you say? “Seven year olds don’t have breasts to push up.” Well that’s what the padding is for, silly! Best of all, after you buy this top, all your little princess will need is some hooker pants (try Gap), and she’ll be ready for the sexual slave trade.

I hear Thailand is beautiful this time of year.

(Hat tip: Babble.)

HIM: I hate going.
ME: Why, what’s up?
HIM: Every time I ask a question someone rolls their eyes at me.
ME: Find another group then.
HIM: Really?
ME: Yeah. And stop asking when your kid will be old enough to play Halo.

Then, a day later, I saw a post on Baby Center about a guy who wasn’t even allowed to join a Mommy & Me group in San Francisco. San Francisco?!? Are you shitting me? San Francisco where Good Vibrations was founded? San Francisco where Harvey Milk was elected? San Francisco where they’re about to ban infant circumcision?

Is there another San Francisco in Kentucky maybe?

At any rate, I don’t have either of these guys’ problems. Mine is worse: Nate’s Mommy & Me group has officially accepted me as one of the girls. I know this for a fact because of what happened last Monday. I was standing outside the classroom making small talk with one of the other Moms when, suddenly, in the middle of our conversation about I don’t know what — probably how much poop a diaper can hold — this Mom pulled down her nursing blouse and shoved her nipple into her son’s mouth. I don’t think she even broke sentence, just kept talking.

My first thought was, “Cool, everyone has finally relaxed around me.” But a couple hours later it occurred to me that this was actually kind of depressing. What did it say about me that a strange woman thought nothing of whipping her boob out in my presence? Let’s say I really did look like George Clooney . . . or Brad Pitt . . . or that Neanderthal they’re basing the next Ken Doll on. Would she have done it then? I bet not. Which, despite my iron-clad marital status, is still a little depressing. It’s like you wipe your kid’s butt for a couple months and all the sudden you’re some eunuch who’s allowed to sleep in the same room as the virgins. “Nighty night,” the King is telling us. “If anyone is tired, Scott will give you a foot massage.”

I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep my loin cloth pulled low and try to blend in.

Maybe no one will ever notice.