thoughts

the twin challenges of reading and other children

September 14, 2016 by krisis

EV had a 36-hour runny-nosed cold yesterday and I’d really like to blame it on other children, but I refuse to let them take credit for all of the books we read together.

On Monday I finally went to the gym at the local YMCA, five months into this stay-at-home experiment that was supposed to be at least fractionally about getting back into the shape I was in five years ago. Going to the gym by day meant depositing EV into a kid’s playroom for the better part of an hour – something that has always given me pause.

I’ve met the director at the Y and would trust her chosen child-minders implicitly, plus the environment is a room filled with toys and books without a screen in sight. The pause comes from the children they are minding. I don’t know them or their manners or what vapid TV shows they watch or what their parents have been teaching them.

It’s tempting to assign this fear of other children to a yuppy millennial helicopter parenting, and I’m sure some portion of it has to do with that, but my fear of other children influencing EV comes from my own distaste for other kids growing up. I wanted no part of them and their messy, silly, rough ways. Even though I watched all the TV they did and played with a lot of the same toys, I never wanted to be associated with other kids. I didn’t even want to be one myself, which was an easy illusion to maintain as I hung out in bars with my father and went out to dinner with my mother.

I’m not trying to raise EV to be a mini-me or to have the same mistrust of her peers that I had – to this day it remains as an unhealthy habit of keeping my peers at arm’s length. Yet, when I see kids EV’s age who act up, always have their hands in their mouth, spout nonsense words, are picky with food, yell and screech, or play rough and imitate guns, I can’t help but sneer at them just as I did when I was a little kid. I don’t want EV to miss out on important peer interaction, but I don’t want her to think that behavior is the acceptable norm, either. You can be more of a kid than I was without being a terrible little snot-nosed monster.

So, I gritted my teeth and left her eagerly exploring the play room while I huffed and puffed and lifted weights for an hour. She was perfectly cheerful when I picked her up.

Four hours later every part of my body was sore from class and EV had a definite case of the sniffles. “It was those damned runny nosed play-room kids,” I raged over internet chat to E and Lindsay. To their eternal credit as my life-parter and BFF, respectively, they replied separately but in verbatim unison: colds don’t incubate in four hours.

In other words: cool your jets, helicopter pilot.

The sniffles continued into yesterday, which put a whammy on some of our plans – I didn’t want to be the asshole parent who brought a contagious kid to the playground. (This led to me trying to explain the concept of “contagious” to EV – I love that we’re in the explaining things phase of parenting). Instead, we made a return trip the library to pick up a new batch of books to read at home. There, the librarian talked us into joining their “1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Challenge.”

“We’re starting this a bit late,” I said, trying to dissuade her from signing us up.

“It’s plenty of time!” she responded cheerily as she began to copy EV’s information down onto a registration card. “Plus, you can always count re-reading the same book multiple times.

It was as if she said the magic words. I could feel OCD Godzilla revving up in the interior of my gut, sharpening his nails within my bile duct as he contemplated that most kids were doing a SELECT ALL instead of a COUNT DISTINCT when querying their book reading – the obvious tactics of a book challenge cheater.

Godzilla and I quickly did the math. We had 24 months until Kindergarten, which meant maintaining a solid clip of 42 new books a month to hit the mark. But that was barely a book a day! We easily did 5-6 even on a slow day, but those were repeats from our own collection. Surely we could do better with 26 branches of the Delaware County Library System at our disposal and me as a stay-at-home-parent.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, giving the librarian a sly sidewise smile, “what’s the fastest anyone has ever completed the challenge.”

We’ve read 30 books in the last 24hrs and have another 20 ready to pick up at the library tomorrow. Today we cleared off our entire bookshelf to begin plotting our path through re-reading them and logging them for the challenge – which, to EV, is like letting her loose in a candy store. I quickly tired of hand-entry on the challenge sheet and switched over to a database format that would also track durations and duplicate reads.

I think we can nail this thing down in less than 100 days.

on unsolicited compliments, and how little girls should respond to them

September 4, 2016 by krisis

I’ve written about the difference between me getting an unsolicited compliment and EV getting one, and about how she is not a princess.

What those two situations – and posts – have in common is me responding on EV’s behalf, which has been my habit since she was pre-verbal continuing through the typical two-year-old stranger-danger shyness. If someone reduced her to a pretty girl or a princess, I got the claws out.

Now I’m the parent of a three-year-old who is much more attentive to the sorts of responses I dole out, and who sometimes wants to respond (or, emphatically not respond) on her own … and I’m not sure what to do. It’s one of the few situations where I find that the difference in EV and my genders is making me unsure of my parenting decisions.

2016-08-17 12.17.26 That’s a big deal for me. E and I were just discussing how relatively neutral our parenting style is when it comes to gender. Aside from wearing a bathing top at the pool and some undefinable level of unconscious bias, I don’t think EV has experiencing a remarkable different toddlerdom in this household than a boy would.

We restrict certain tough play and violence, just as we would from a boy. Aside from screening out toxic princess culture, it’s not as though we’re hiding anything coded explicitly for girls from her. E and I even present a relatively similar role to EV – she’s seen both of us do most chores and caretaking tasks. We both have fancy colored hair.

I’d say the big differences are that E will put her in dresses more often and is better at painting nails than I am.

Yet, this little issue of how (if at all) EV ought to respond to unsolicited compliments has stopped me in my tracks, while E has no hesitation contending with it.

I generally respond to any remark directed my way from a stranger so long as they aren’t physically threatening, whether it’s meant positively or negatively. That’s a hard-won ease for me, rather than a chauvinistic obliviousness. I went a long time assuming any comment I received would be a mocking one. I’ve been harassed from passing cars just for walking down the street and threatened with violence because I “talk gay.” I was a strident teen, but it took two more decades for me to own my self-image enough to withstand that. Luckily, society changed a bit, too. Now I look and talk however the hell I want with no apology.

However, none of my experiences compare to the near-constant sexualization every woman fields from every comment, whether its complimentary or mocking, no matter the gender of the commenter. And, while I’ve been threatened with physical violence, I’ve rarely if ever had to walk down the street with the specter of sexual violence haunting my steps.

That’s what I find myself up against when EV receives a comment from a stranger.

The first few times, I encouraged her to say “hi” in return or “thank you.” I immediately sensed the dissonance there and the bad precedent I was setting. No one deserves EV’s attention just for talking to her. She might develop a social contract that dictates reciprocity with someone she sees frequently, but she owes nothing to strangers.

Yet, I also don’t want to encourage EV to simply passively absorb these opinions. If one of them makes her feel positive or negative, she should be vocal about that. If she doesn’t care, she should ignore them.

Last week presented a pair of examples in a span of hours.

First, at the library, a pair of young black women were sitting across from us at the library while EV carefully fussed over a book and I filled out our card applications. After observing us for a minute and laughing to themselves, they both complimented EV – one to me, and the other to EV directly. I thanked and chatted the woman who spoke to me. EV didn’t respond to the other one. She seemed for a moment as if she might press it with EV, but then let it go.

That felt fine to me. The second example didn’t. We were at a home improvement store, coincidentally being helped by another young black woman. She had been with us for several minutes, and had chatted with EV about the projects we were doing without making any comments about her appearance. When we hit a snag in my shopping, she asked an older, white, male co-worker. He answered her in an annoyed, condescending way, and then turned his eye to EV.

“Aren’t you a cutie?” he said to her.

She ignored him.

“Aww, are you a little shy?”

I was only halfway absorbing this, as I was having my own conversation with the woman, who seemed slightly cowed by her coworker’s rude response. I don’t think EV was being especially shy. She was doing a silly dance in the middle of the plumbing aisle. It seemed obvious that she simply wasn’t interesting in engaging.

Yet, the man kept talking to her in an insistent, insincerely cloying way, pressing her from all angles to respond with increasing annoyance. At this point, I was tuned in.

“What did you do this summer? Did you go to the beach? Did you make castles? Did you bury dad in the sand? Huh, did you?”

I spent an agonizing hour on post-game analysis with E last week. Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I indicate to EV she shouldn’t feel the need to answer?

I know what a sincere interest in my kid looks like from a speaker of any gender presentation. Not only have I learned to see it, but whether or not EV responds she always remembers the sincere people and brings them up later. This was not that. Maybe this guy was a father of daughters of his own, but he was also probably going to make a comment about the ass of the next women who walked down the aisle as soon as she was out of earshot. I could just feel it. (And, it’s borne itself out in the following days with no remarks from EV about the conversation.)

EV’s instincts were better than mine in that moment: she was absolutely right to keep on doing her silly dance and completely ignore this guy. But the point is she shouldn’t have had to.

That doesn’t just apply to leering older gentlemen. It’s for kind young women at the library, doting teens at the pool, and every other human being who wants to ascribe value to EV’s appearance and then tell her about it and then stand there expecting something in return.

She owes them nothing, and while she seems to already sense that on her own, it’s one good choice I’m not sure how to model and reinforce.

the unglamorous life

August 30, 2016 by krisis

I am writing this missive to you from a park bench at a playground, purple and pink hair half up in a messy bun, wearing a too-large Lisa Loeb t-shirt with an unidentifiable stain on the breast, a pair of gym shorts, and a pair of sunglasses dangling from a strap on my neck so I can see the screen.

I have gone “full dad,” as they say. No, this post will not be illustrated by any photos. Whatever you are imagining is bad enough.

There was a time when I had rules about leaving the house. The dress code was strict. I had a “t-shirts permitted in public” drawer that was kept untainted by over-large band shirts I wear to bum around the house. Dress pants or jeans were the only acceptable bottoms; I would only show my bare legs in a casual setting if the temperature was over 90°. Athletic wear? Only for actual instances of exercise. And certainly not any low rise socks that show my ankles. Offensive.

Hair was to be either spectacularly curly or wrapped up in a bandana. Facial scruff had an allowable limit As for a sunglasses strap … just no.

As dress codes go, I think it was stricter than a school’s but maybe not as hardcore as a religion’s. (I do make frequent exceptions to fetch our mail in my underwear, after all).

Well, it took three years, but toddler wrangling has worn me down. All the time I used to spend on choosing and preening is now spent dressing a toddler, making sure she has juice and a head band and a snack and a change of clothes, and maybe making sure her shoes are on the right feet if time allows.

Me? Again, I’ll point out that I willingly left the house in GYM SHORTS. Yet, I also carry a 20lb bag of toddler accessories including our own toilet paper in case we find the TP on our adventures to be unsatisfactory.

(Philly TP report: Philly Zoo, thumbs down. Longwood Garden, thumbs up!)

I think a large part of it has to do with the weather. Heat wears me down. After serving four years in inescapable heat as a summer camp counselor, I spent the next half of my life scurrying for cover (or a pool) on every hot day. I want none of it – not the sweat, not the sunscreen, not the bugs. I don’t have room in my brain to process all of those annoyances.

(I can’t even tell you a time prior to this summer I willingly wore sunscreen not for the purpose of going to a pool or on a long walk. Maybe Bonnaroo? And, if you recall, I was asking to be airlifted out of that by the second day.)

I knew when I made the choice to stay home that one of the biggest challenges would be keeping things interesting in the hot weather. My mandate to create great memories aside, a toddler’s manic wiggles don’t miraculously evaporate in the heat and humidity any more than they do in the frigid cold.

And apparently my coping mechanism is “not giving a fuck.”

Cover songs or originals – which are easier to play?

July 17, 2016 by krisis

We held an unusual rehearsal in our dining room today – three hours of running through the Smash Fantastic cover song repertoire, but as fronted by my Arcati Crisis co-writer and BFF Gina.

An incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind shot of the first time Gina and I performed music together on stage (also the first time I sang solo in public!) This was in 1997 at Masterman, peforming “Sharks Can’t Sleep” by Tracy Bonham. From left to right: me, Joanna, Lucy, and Gina.

The strange arrangement is the result of being asked to play a big benefit show during a week where Ashley will be on vacation. It’s a fun show and we love donating our time to it, so Ashley gave her blessing for us to play it with a fill-in vocalist.

Despite you all knowing Gina primarily for her amazing songwriting and intuitive harmony vocals, she is an awesome interpreter and karaoke veteran. It helps that the rest of the band – Jake, Zina, and I – is the same for both Smash Fantastic and Arcati Crisis.

It was a rollicking rehearsal full of surprises – for example, after over 20 years of friendship I found out that Gina loves “Because The Night” as much as I do, but she does not quite know how to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.” We also played a rare pair of our own “Holy Grail” and “Better” with Gina on vocals but not on guitars!

The most interesting part for me was the conversation while we packed up. As we were coiling wires, Gina mentioned off-handedly that she found getting the cover songs right to be much more challenging than playing in an original band.

That took me by surprise! Gina is a confident, experienced singer – I would never expect she would be stressed by cover songs. In fact, I invited her to fill in because I thought she’d find singing two hours of covers a relief in comparison to the stress of shredding through our own songs. However, her reasoning resonated: when you’re covering a song, there’s an existing standard to be held to. As great an interpreter as you may be, you’ve got to get the lyrics right and hit the expected high notes before people will even begin to consider if your performance is any good.

I know that’s the reality, but I’ve never considered it that way. For me, cover songs are a fun vacation from the intense challenge of playing original music.

With cover songs, you simply have to capture the spirit of a song people know well. While Jake tends to hew closely to the real basslines of songs, Zina and I approximate their drum fills and guitar riffs. It’s about verisimilitude. If you give a crowd a hint of the real thing, they don’t notice all the elements you leave out.

That works in our favor on songs for which we can’t quite assemble all the elements of a recording, but it also works in our favor – our covers of “Bang Bang” and “Uptown Funk” dress up the more bare originals considerably with additional passing chords, while even on a classic like “The Way You Make Me Feel” Jake has installed a more propulsive bassline that is only implied in the original.

The first time Gina and I played guitar together in front of people! This was in 1998 at Masterman, playing U2’s “With Or Without You” for the departing senior class. Psychedelic water damage courtesy of my Sophomore year apartment.

By contrast, playing originals is terrifying! The only context the audience has are the notes coming from the stage. There is no earned good will or existing song that will put a smile on their face. And, even when you’re in top shape with a set of good songs, it’s impossible to know when they’re good enough.

It’s like doing yoga – you can always challenge yourself to sink deeper into a pose. I have songs that are nearly 20 years old that I still haven’t mastered playing; I found extra harmony on one just a few weeks ago that makes it sound more like itself than it ever has before.

Gina doesn’t have that anxiety. To her, an original song is something entirely under her control not only to interpret, but to shape and transform. The entire point of the thing is that it belongs to you and it might continue to evolve. That’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s a joy.

I was so intrigued that as best-friends and co-writers Gina and I could differ on this point, but it explains a lot about our relative comfort over the years as performers. There’s no disputing that I’m more vivid and energetically myself on stage in Smash Fantastic, just as Gina is obviously transfixing in Arcati Crisis when she settles into playing an original like “Song for Mrs. Schroeder.”

It will be an interesting eight weeks of getting 30 songs ready for this cover gig, but I think I’m even more intrigued by what Gina and I will know about ourselves afterward when we turn our attention back to originals for the first time in three years.

our supersized supermarkets

July 16, 2016 by krisis

I’ve been thinking about groceries, scale, and the American way.

Last night, while our daughters napped under J’s watch, Lindsay and I absconded to Wegmans for a quick shopping trip slash Pokémon catching session. Yes, you read that right – we had an hour to ourselves and we went grocery shopping for amusement. To be fair, Wegmans is definitely like an amusement park for hungry adults recovering from five hours swimming in a lake with two boisterous young ladies.

Photo by Flickr User Seuss. Some rights reserved.

You could fit an entire French supermarket into this Wegman’s photo. Photo by Flickr User Seuss. 2008, some rights reserved.

I know I’m a little late to coming around to Wegmans – heck, Lindsay grew up shopping at one! Even as I marveled at how Wegmans has every possibly thing (Six different kinds of raw shrimp to choose from! Three different kinds of Tahini! Every single organic vegetable! Liquor and Beer!), I also reflected on the very middle/upper-class American condition of being excited to visit a grocery store that’s as much about leisure as it is about subsistence.

My grocery situation as a small child was all about subsistence. For deli and packs of cigarettes, we had a tiny Vietnamese bodega on our corner, and for other groceries a smallish Stop and Save and Shop or Something on the next block that accepted our food stamps. I remember being mystified by the cheap brands of frozen foods like waffles or steaks that I had never heard of before – because they didn’t advertise on TV.

When an Acme was installed on 80th street it was big news, and the long aisles full of expanded cereal choices and real meat counter seemed like luxuries – likely combined with the fact that we had graduated from welfare with my mom getting her degree and could more readily afford such things.

In college we alternated between a newly-opened Fresh Grocer, which was like a slightly watered-down Whole Foods, and a local Thriftway that Lindsay, Erika and I re-christened “Theftway” for its sometimes-shady customers and peculiar aisle arrangement. Theftway was great for getting cheap name brands, but for anything special, fresh, or healthy we’d take the four block walk to Fresh Grocer.

On our honeymoon the tiny Paris apartment E and I were renting had an impossibly small miniature refrigerator, which meant we needed to restock our food options every other day. That wasn’t so unusual, and the local grocery store reinforced that – it was no bigger than a suburban Wawa and didn’t contain a single super-sized portion of anything. Juices topped out in half gallons, and paper towels came in a max three-rolls-per-pack. When it came to wide varieties, the selection focused on fresh things like cheeses, breads, and juices rather than 100 different kinds of cereal.

We loved it. Bigger doesn’t always have to be better.

Now my local haunt is an impossibly large Giant, which has nearly put our local Acme out of business – it looks dismal by comparison. Not coincidentally, it’s now completely devoid of the upper-middle-class suburban shoppers that used to clog its aisles. After all, Giant has not one but two aisles of healthy and gluten-free foods!

That’s not meant as a knock on GF stuff, since it’s a requirement in our household – more an acknowledgement of the kind of choices that become important to you when you’re not looking for the foods that your WIC check will cover. Recently EV and I had a long wait behind a couple who were trying to figure out what they could cover with WIC checks and what they needed to pay in cash.

After they were finished, the cashier fixed me with a grimace and apologized for the wait. I responded, “No worries, I remember what that was like.”

She gave me a puzzled look in return and started ringing my groceries.

These were my thoughts as Lindsay and I wandered through the stadium-sized Wegman’s. Do we need all of this super-sized choice to be satisfied as consumers? How lucky are we that buying our meals is an act of amusement and convenience? How lucky are we that we can buy them at all?