Entries tagged as ‘family’
So Ann says, “I went over my minutes last month.” You what? “I went over my minutes. Last month.” Really? How many minutes do you get? “Three-thousand.” After I wiped away the coffee that shot out my nose, I cleaned off the laptop and started doing the math. That’s a lot of minutes. It’s fifty hours, or if you prefer, two days and two hours. It’s a week at work these days —and seven nights worth of sleep. It’s a hundred episodes of Thirty Minute Meals.
I don’t think anyone has ever described me as “chatty,” especially not in regard to the phone. My calls are monosyllabic affairs of cryptic guy-speak: “Yeah. Uh-huh. Maybe. You got that right.” But Ann is obviously another story. She loves to talk and people love to talk to her. Sure, some of it is work, but mostly it’s what she does best, being a good friend to the people she cares about.
Maybe I can give her some of my minutes.
Categories: Marriage · Modern Living
Tagged: cell phones, family, Marriage, technology
When Dancing With The Stars comes on, I’m gone. I can’t stand to watch even five seconds of that show—especially not after what they did to Steve Guttenberg this week. Completely unfair. Anyway, I totally leave the room, except if Jason Taylor is on, because that’s more like watching football than dancing —and I DON’T WATCH DANCING. This is despite the fact that I am trained in ballroom dancing. I spent a lot of time with Ann at Lorraine Michaels taking lessons a few years ago. The first night there, the instructor came over and said we’d have to switch partners after each dance. Switch partners? “Yes,” she explained. “In a social situation, you’ll dance with other partners, so you need to get used to it.” Ann was watching to see what came out of my mouth. “Why would I dance with someone else?” It’s nice to know in a life full of saying the wrong things at the right time you can smack one out of the park now and then.
Categories: Marriage
Tagged: dancing, entertainment, family, manly matters
Zack whispered, “That boy has a doll.” I really wanted to tell him that it’s OK and lots of boys play with dolls, and isn’t it about time we broke down these gender identity roles. But I couldn’t. I also couldn’t tell him about Barbie. When he was a toddler, he got his hands on a Barbie somewhere. Naturally, I was aghast. Alex, who was 10 at the time, demanded to know what I was going to do. “Well…I’m going to get rid of it.” He asked if we could bury it in the backyard. I can’t remember why, but that sounded like a pretty good idea, so early one morning I snatched Barbie and we sneaked outside. In the garden, not far from where several goldfish are interred, we dug a shallow hole and committed her to the great hereafter. Someday someone will find what we buried, but they’ll never know that they’ve dug up more than just a doll.
Categories: Kids · parenting
Tagged: boys, family, manly matters
I’m pretty sure that in ten years there will be big money in tattoo removal —in fact, if you can find a company that makes those tattoo erasing lasers, buy stock. I came home to find that Alex had celebrated his twentieth birthday with some new ink. He hoisted up his shirt and showed me his shoulder, and the brand new bloody skull with an eye patch. I said the first thing that came to mind: “Cool.” I caught hell for this later. “Your job,” I was informed, “Is not to tell him that it’s ‘Cool,’ your job is to tell him that it’s stupid.” I started to explain about how he’s expressing himself and he needs to make these decisions, and after all, it’s too late anyway. No dice. “Well,” I went on, “If he’d gotten a picture of Jesus tattooed on his back, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” That, I found, was not the best argument to make on Good Friday. Have a look at after the jump. (more…)
Categories: Kids
Tagged: bad ideas, family, Marriage, tattoos
