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your princess is in another castle

July 2, 2016 by krisis

Without realizing it, each Wednesday for our weekly adventure I have gotten in the habit of dressing EV in her “This is what a programmer looks like” t-shirt from Django Girls, a non-profit that helps women learn to code. I hadn’t even realized the pattern until I scanned through our recent photos and saw the shirt again and again in the shots from Wednesdays.

I really love when EV wears that shirt. It’s awesome seeing examples of diversity of gender and race in the tech community, and there’s something even more powerful for me to see children implicated in that. That programmer woman you so desperately wish you could add to your team isn’t a magical unicorn who you could easily identify out of a lineup of women. She’s a person. She started out as a little girl. That is what a programmer looks like.

EV a few seconds after this week’s “princess” incident.

However, this week I discovered an extra layer to adventuring in our “programmer” shirt when someone repeatedly referred to EV as “princess.”

We do not use the word “princess” in this household.

It was one of my early edicts of parenting even before a little girl emerged in the delivery room. I don’t like princess culture. Yes, they’re lovely and the stories are classic. It’s wonderful that princesses are increasingly portrayed as active, adventurous, and empowered.

However, even the most well-intended princess is still a princess. They’ve either won their status via a birth lottery that blessed them with royalty even as it cursed them with the prick of a spinning wheel or they romanced a prince who won a birth lottery and have now gained elevated status all thanks to love.

Neither is a message I feel needs encoding on a toddler whose brain is a sponge. Do we insist that every hero a little boy idolizes be a prince? No – more often the heroes presented to boys have earned their status through their actions, even if they are frequently working from the same book of “chosen one” tropes.

I see how EV absorbs every little input. She will reference minuscule details of events from weeks or months ago out of the blue with perfect recollection. It’s not special – it’s what toddlers do. What happens when you feed that spongey brain the message about birth lottery and marrying into status over and over and over again as the underpinnings of an otherwise innocuous and delightful story before they even understand how to consume stories?

Maybe nothing. Maybe just the pathological need to dress up in fancy dresses. That’s fine. It’s the other implications I dislike. Glam knows that plenty of today’s most successful women consumed these stories as kids, but why sandbag a little brain with confusing messages? I don’t think it’s ever too early to teach a doctrine of free will, nondeterminism, and consent, and princess culture can undermine all three.

I try not to get the claws out over a stray “princess” from someone speaking to EV the way I did at first (especially when it’s from a woman, because it lacks a leering aspect of condescension isn’t as present when it’s from someone of the same gender). This week I let the first mention from a man slide by. Then there was a second, and I bit my tongue. The third, delivered with him crouched down at eye level with EV, set me off.

“I think you meant ‘programmer’,” I said.

“Hmm? What?”

“You keep calling her ‘princess.’ She’s not a princess. Stop saying that.”

What I should have added was, “She’s not a princess now and she’s not aspiring to be one, either. So, you might as well call her ‘programmer.’ Or ‘doctor’ or ‘director’ or ‘engineer’ or ‘professor’ or anything, really, but certainly not the one thing she will almost certainly never be, because Kate Middleton is an extreme outlier. At the very least, can we settle on, ‘big girl’?”

“Or ‘president’.”

like a carnival ride, I kept swinging from side the side

June 30, 2016 by krisis

Last night, Mother of Krisis and I brought EV to the Wildwood Boardwalk for her first encounter with funnel cake, seagulls, and carnival rides.

(I think EV has already encountered white trash within the actual boundaries of Philadelphia. HEY-OH.)

(I kid, I kid. I actually have a deep, abiding love of the Wildwood Boardwalk as the sole interesting thing about being dragged to the beach multiple times each summer. It offers many bounties, like Curly’s Fries, Salt Water Taffy, and Lime Rickey, and it’s where I first encountered the six-player X-Men arcade game which birthed my obsession with Dazzler.)

2016-06-29 19.11.35 Our first excursion was a set of Jeep-like buggies which rode up and down over invisible hills, encountering some bumps along the way. Since it was EV’s first ride and because I did not want to be the parent yelling soothing words at a crying child trapped on a ride for two more minutes, I opted to ride along with her in the comedically small car. EV sat in the driver’s seat, with me crouched awkwardly behind her.

(Mother refers to rides vaguely as “the attractions” in the manner of a jaded carny.)

I was immediately happy with my choice to accompany EV, because before the ride even began we were attacked by half a dozen seagulls. We hadn’t even had the funnel cake yet, but maybe she had one little crumb in her hair from lunch or something. Those fuckers are ruthless. My Tiger Father instincts kicked in and I formed a fleshy suit of gull armor around EV’s body, slapping birds away with the flats of my palms.

Actually, the seagull attack was a good introduction to the boardwalk. Not only did EV totally understand our need to eat funnel cake covertly later in the evening, but I think the gulls were scarier than any of the rides. After that, the the buggy bumps were only mildly alarming – possibly just because they were invisible.

The first time around, EV looked back at me, wincing. Not a good sign. “That’s the bumps!” I exclaimed, joyfully. “You have to get ready to steer over them.” The second time there was no wincing, but still an expression of great concern.

The third time there was maniacal laughter and an expression of pure joy. She would ride the buggies several more times – without me along in the backseat.

This morning we cast about for something to do that was not the beach, because my anxiety builds exponentially with each grain of sand stuck to my person. We settled on a tandem surrey ride on the boardwalk.

I enjoy the boardwalk by day – when I was trapped at the shore against my will as a kid I would walk its full, mostly-empty length and back while early risers hit the beach (a preview of my adult jogging on the Vegas strip while the prior night’s revelers were still passed out on benches).

The problem with this plan was the bit about working in tandem. Though Mother of Krisis is still convalescing from surgery, she thought she’d be able to occasionally contribute to the pedaling of said surrey. Perhaps she could have. The issue we encountered was that her feet could not even reach the pedals.

That meant I would be the sole pedaler for our 90-minute journey.

Let’s do some back of napkin math, shall we? A bit of web sleuthing reveals the surrey is 265 pounds, shipped. I’ll be generous and assume 10% of that weight is packaging. Mother of Krisis, EV, and I combined weigh 356 pounds. I carry a backpack that is another 15 pounds, at least, owing in part to the 100oz Camelbak full of water inside (for which I was very thankful).

That meant I spent 90 minutes locomoting over 600 pounds of Krisis Family Vacation up and down the boardwalk with only the power of my thick Italian thighs, all while small children on bikes and surreys powered by more than one person bobbed and weaved around us.

I wish I could say that writing this blog constituted the sum total of my subsequent physical activity for the day, but afterwards I swam laps while EV splashed around with her grandpop.

See: I really don’t vacation well. The only way to push through my mounting anxiety is to treat each day like I am on some sort of reality TV fitness challenge.

logarithmic monsters

June 29, 2016 by krisis

EV and I are headed to the Jersey Shore today for a stay of between 16 and 36 hours.

That’s more intimidating to me than a descent into the mouth of hell in the style of Dante’s Inferno. It’s an inferno plus a trip to a zoo plus sand. I have already packed five bags and I am still certain that I’ve forgotten something. If you were to pass our car en route to our destination you would assume we were on the final leg of a cross-country trek rather than a 90-minute drive to interact with throngs of primarily South Philadelphians enjoying an early start to a long weekend.

It’s been thoroughly well-established at this point in CK’s nearly two decades of history that I do not travel well.

More accurately, I am totally cool with traveling but I need several days to exhaustively pack at least half of my worldly belongings for the trip such that my internal OCD Godzilla is satisfied I am prepared for every possible contingency, and since I usually don’t have the time or ability to do that I make up for it by not traveling especially well.

I’d call it “traveling exceedingly grumpy.”

I don’t exactly mean a trip to Europe here. We’re talking about any excursion longer than an hour car ride or 12 hours in length. Having a laptop and a carry-on travel guitar has slightly eased my anxieties, but there’s still the clothes. I mean, the shoes alone are at least a suitcase’s worth for a two-day trip. More if there will be formal dining.

Thus, as you would expect, traveling with a toddler opens up whole new realms of my innards for OCD Godzilla to stomp and thrash through, giving me untold additional amounts of agita about leaving the house. While I wasn’t exactly thrilled about traveling with a baby, the possibilities were finite. N hours away from home was X number of cloth diapers + Y amount of outfits + Z cubes of frozen pureed food. All of the options of Xs and Ys and Zs were interchangeable. It was a fixed, linearly progressing equation.

Not so with a toddler. It’s fucking logarithmic and that’s not just my OCD Godzilla on a rampage talking – it’s reality.

A perfect example of this going well was a recent 6-hour trip with EV to a farm to pick berries. I figured EV needed an outfit to travel in, something lighter if it got much hotter, her swimsuit, a second set of clothes to change into post-farm if she got very dirty or interacted with animals, PJs for if we stayed out late enough that she would fall asleep on the way home, and an emergency change of clothes. That doesn’t even account for food, a book to read in the car, hair ties, et cetera, but let’s stay focused on clothes for the purposes of this example.

Somehow, we used every outfit by the time we got home. I actually had to dip into the emergency stash! It’s not as if I kept changing her clothes for fun or just to burn through them, as I do personally just to keep things theatrical. These were outfit changes necessary for the health, comfort and safety of a toddler.

What if she got irrecoverably dirty a second time?! (As for the first: don’t ask). Then she’d be walking around just in the spare set of underwear I keep in the car just in case.

And, though the farm was dusty, there wasn’t any sand there.

So, if you happen to be driving through New Jersey today and you see a steel blue Toyota packed to the gills with a toddler in the backseat who demands that Aimee Mann be played at all times while driving on a highway, please wish those travelers godspeed and hope that the purple-haired guy behind the wheel has a internal King Ghidorah who can temporarily block and tackle his OCD Godzilla long enough for him to get all of the sand out of his shoes.

Who you gonna call? Not the plumber.

June 26, 2016 by krisis

EV being an oddball while not dancing on any graves on a walk through the cemetery three months ago.

What I didn’t mention when I described my uneventful call to the plumber on Friday is that it occurred in the midst of a walk with EV through our local cemetery, and that during the call I saw what E has now convinced me was a ghost.

Possibly two ghosts.

I didn’t think they were a ghosts at the time. As I was talking to our plumber, the first appeared sort of out of nowhere and began walking very briskly toward me. He was older, but not as old as my parents, and in a neon colored t-shirt shirt that seemed to indicate that in some capacity he was trying not to be hit by a car.

“Shit,” I thought as I tried to keep up the conversation about faucets with our plumber while the man closed the distance between us with purpose, “he must be a groundskeeper or someone else who is going to chastise me for letting my toddler run around while I make calls in this sacred space.”

(To be fair, I am usually fairly reverent when walking around the cemetery. I’m really not the kind of person who makes calls anywhere but the controlled environment of my office, but the plumber called me back and I wasn’t going to miss my opportunity.)

And then… I don’t especially recall what happened. He never walked up to me or said anything. I think he smiled? EV and I were standing towards the middle of the drive walking north but I don’t remember him circling to either side to move past us to the south. But, who knows? I was trying to overcome my renters’ mentality by making arrangements for home repairs while ensuring that toddler didn’t literally dance on anyone’s grave. I’m sure I just wasn’t paying attention.

Except, then we saw him again and he was with another ghost.

I ended the call with the plumber and EV and and I swung west around the disused greenhouse attached to one of the cottages on the property. She wanted to “sneak up on the house” (which involves her running up a walk to try to jump off a step or touch the siding), but I saw that some of the basement windows were broken through and was trying to wrangle her back to the curbside.

“Oh, hello,” the older man said as he approached us from the road to the north. I think it was the same man. He was the same age with the same leathery-skin tanned look about him, although I was sure that his neon shirt had been a different color a moment before. There was also the fact that he had been headed south at least 500 feet behind us and hadn’t passed us.

Maybe, but not with the child he now had in tow. The boy was just stepping away from a low headstone he had been examining closely. He was wiry and a few inches taller than EV, with an equine nose upon which rested a very unchildlike pair of square-framed, polarized glasses. He was staring at me from over their rims.

“Ah,” I said brightly, tugging EV away from her act of trespassing. “It’s such beautiful weather.” I decided that this was vague enough that it couldn’t possible offend them if they had been visiting the grave of a loved one.

(Or, upon reflection, their own.)

“It is!” the man replied cheerily as the boy moved to idle by his side. “My grandson is showing his ol’ pops around the place.” Which immediately made no sense to me because pops had just been wandering around by himself without the grandson a moment ago. How did he have enough time to circle back, retrieve the boy, circle ahead of us, and examine tombstones? But, I have a certain way that I talk to children like little people adopted from my own years of precocity, and I already launched into it.

“Oh, do you know it well?” This directed at the boy. “I’m always getting turned around when I walk through here. I don’t understand which roads connect to the others.”

“Sure I do,” he said. “I live in the house over there.”

He gestured and I followed his finger while he continued to chatter. The house he was pointing to seemed like another one of the dilapidated cottages on the grounds – not one I’d expect a young boy to live, although I supposed a groundskeeper could live there with a little family. As I listened to him speak I noticed that EV had taken leave of me and was continuing to walk a few steps past where we had stopped to chat with each other.

The boy was still speaking, but the man interrupted him.

“How old is she?”

I took my customary pause to see if EV would respond, but she made no motion to turn around. “A few weeks shy of three,” I answered, drifting slightly in her direction. “How old are you?” I said, indicating the boy with my chin.

“Oh, he’s three, too,” the man answered. I squinted down at the boy. He did not look or sound three. He was articulate and self-possessed. He was dressed like a slightly miniature seven or eight year old who had just discovered he could stand out from his peers with a slight sartorial tweak. He continued to watch me over the rims of his tinted square glasses in a distinctly un-three-year-old like way.

EV was now three body-lengths from me along the road. There had been no cars in sight so far, I knew that distance to be the point where I cannot wind sprint to scoop her up in less than a second, so I hurried to catch up with her. Maybe I called out, “sorry,” over my shoulder.

I caught up with EV and put my arm around her shoulders. She giggled up at me. “EV, you were running away from our new friends,” I glanced back at the man, waving jauntily at EV, and the boy, as still as a portrait. “That little boy lives here.” She paid me no mind and kept walking up the road.

It wasn’t until much later, in describing our encounter to E over dinner, that I realized EV never once acknowledged the pair of them – not with a glance or with her typical shy toddler routine of standing slightly behind my leg.

I don’t think she ever saw them.

a few small repairs

June 24, 2016 by krisis

“Broken Toilet” by Siobhan McKeown. Some rights reserved.

Last week was the six year anniversary of our buying this house and I still don’t know how to do anything.

Seriously. I still haven’t replaced a single fixture in six years. I’m great at fixing electronics (ask me about that one time I baked our television) and cleaning, but my list of house projects goes something like, “get poster framed and then beg E to hang it for me.”

Meanwhile, E has hung many pictures, replaced fixtures, painted whole rooms, installed complex wall-hanging laundry systems, supervised the replacement of no less than four doors and fourteen windows, and personally sourced and laid a set of slate steps.

Yes, she is a badass.

As for me, I refer to my combination of reticence and inability as “renter’s mentality.” This is the first home I’ve ever owned. My mother and I lived in three different rented homes, including one house for almost fifteen years. The only thing we ever altered – and I mean the only thing – was paying someone to paint-and-popcorn-ceiling a back room for me in a vomitous seafoam green when I became a teenager so I didn’t have to have a tiny shoebox of a bedroom with a connecting door to her room.

The wallpaper was uniquely hideous in every room, as if there was some sort of game of ugly oneupmanship going on when the house was initially decorated. The sole light source in the living room was a dilapidated chandelier missing several of its dangling crystals and bearing the tattered streamer of a long ago party. It had a certain Miss Havisham quality to it. The kitchen … it was the worst kitchen you can possibly imagine. I still have nightmares about it. It was carpeted, and that was the least-bad thing about it. We didn’t have much money, but I’m sure we could have done something about some of it.

Yet, we were paralyzed in the middle of the renter mentality triangle – decision-paralysis about changing something we didn’t own, lack of budget and hesitance to sink money into something we didn’t own, and lack of knowledge of how to do anything because we weren’t the owners who had to deal with it.

Even though E and I owning our house removes all of the “didn’t own” aspects of that vicious triangle, I’m still stuck inside its three walls, held hostage by the tiniest of options. We want a new faucet for our kitchen and the idea that I have to choose a semi-permanent fixture for our home and then see through its installation was paralyzing.

I kind of sort of committed to a style and then stalled. What if the finish didn’t exactly match the rest of the kitchen? How could I pick a new handle I’d be interacting with dozens of times a day without an intense, hands-on study of UI, UX, and ergonomics?

(Are you beginning to understand how hard it is to be married to me?)

This past Sunday, E looked me in the eye and spoke in the kind of calm, measured voice you use when you’re trying to approach a wild animal without spooking it.

“Peter,” she crooned, “we really need to replace the toilet in the master bathroom.” She saw the fear in my eyes. The toilet. That’s permanent porcelain piece of furniture!

“The tank does not fit into space between the bowl and the wall,” she continued, soothingly, “and so it has a bad seal to the floor. The plumber said he couldn’t fix it again with caulk. It’s time.”

I gulped and nodded imperceptibly. It was a perfectly good toilet! How could we throw it away? It would probably cost untold thousands of dollars to replace and could result in the demolition of the entire bathroom – we might have to knock down a wall in the back of the house and get a crane into the back yard to winch it out.

“You just have to talk to the plumber.” This is the part where you have locked eyes with the animal and are slowly backing it towards the cage in which you are trying to capture it, for its own safety and yours. “Just find out what we need to do.”

Today is Friday. I managed to be busy enough with car repairs and writing and hanging out with our little scamp that I avoided the call all week, but this morning I knew I had to bite the bullet and talk to our plumber – not the hardest call, since he is the most patient human being in the universe who once had to respond to my emergency call after I crashed our car into our house.

I made the call. I described the problem and braced for impact. Would we need to move out of the house for a week while he did the repairs?

“Oh, I could stop by with the toilet on Monday if you want,” he responded.

Did he mean, stop by with his team of burly men, fleet of construction equipment, and double-wide trailer for porcelain throne hauling?

“No, just me.”

I was in awe. How much would such a feat cost? Could we afford it and continue to feed EV her diet of copious fresh fruits and vegetables, or would she spend her fourth year of life eating ramen, exclusively.

Let’s just say, replacing a toilet costs less than my typical monthly order of new comic books.

I was so relieved, I followed up with, “Hey, do you replace faucets?”