April lameness

I don’t know what my deal is with blogs. I never write in them, even if I have one fan (you know who you are) who loves my posts. Instead I spend each month trying to keep mental notes of things people have said, or kooky situations where my kids have done something where I can refer to them later as dicks, then promptly forget them. I’m always drawn back though. I keep trying to shut this site down to relieve the burden but I always open it back up again. Maybe if I was an industry leader like John, my old coworker- where I would have profound things to say about something I’m interested in, but I have no interests. Well that’s not completely true. I have interests in things that are completely useless. Not “Useless” in the inspiring-after-school-special way, where my useless interest is in playing video games until one day I become the owner of a site like Penny Arcade and can talk about my humble, misunderstood beginnings. No, my interests lie in things that can’t be capitalized on, like how I spent a good portion of Tuesday night setting up firefox to be literally “perfect” in it’s theme and plugins. I mean, I spent something close to two hours doing it. I don’t even like firefox, it’s bloated and keeps crashing- I use chrome. But no, I felt compelled to spend two hours making this “home away from home” of browsers. There’s no way to tap into that which will land me on the cover of “Fast Company” with a headline that reads, “And THEY thought I was an idiot”.

Audrey is hooked on watching “iCarly”. She studies it, leaning forward with unblinking eyes, watching every gesture, listening to the inflections as they snottily declare “what-evs” or “toat-innaproaps”. Its the secret world of teenagers that she desperately wants to get in on, and the reason why she basically worships my 14 year old niece. Its cute, but kind of sad at the same time because shes having her childhood replaced at the age of 4 with an obsession with clothes and whatever boy band is being thrown at her. She silently mouths back all the catch-phrases, eyes never leaving the screen and her tiny arms wrapped around her knees. And they all come back to me at some point in the form of a sassy demand for a glass of milk, or a flippant response to one of my classic, classic mind you, butt jokes. “Oh Audrey!” Ill say, pressing pause on the DVR, “President Obama was on television today.”
“Dad! Turn the show back on!”
“No, seriously, this is important.”
“What then?!”
“He got on the air today, it was during lunch, I listened to it on my computer while I was at work.”
“So?!”
“Well it was kind of scary. And I think you should know this- because your old enough to understand.”
“Yeah?” She says, her voice a little softer and her gaze more intent on me for once. I hesitate, wishing I could steer this conversation in a direction where she will continue to treat me as a authoritative figure, look on me with respect. But dedicated to a joke, I push on.
“He said we have a new enemy, an enemy of our country that threaten our very freedoms.” She’s silent. “He said this enemy could strike at any time, without anyone being prepared. It strikes anyone, the young, the old…”
“What is it?” Audrey asks. Then I fart. I had been holding it for a while so it was loud, with a crisp ripping buzz. Dropping her head down so I could see how her eyes rolled up in dissaproval, she says, “what. Ever.”

And it hurts. Even at my age, the basic need for approval still has the effect where a childs scorn cuts me. My first reaction is to be angry, I should stop letting her watch that and a slew of other pre-teen programming that hits the airways of nick and Disney after 6:00 pm, but I won’t. Because I’m concerned about the very thing that all fathers worry about for their kids: Being hardened enough for the horrible world of elementary school. Or school in general. It was a time in my life that I’d never want to back to, where one always worries about what people thought about them and if they’ll ever be liked enough. But then there were the kids in school who were complete assholes. Where you didn’t want to say so much as “hi” to them for fear that they would lash out at you for your clothes, or the friends you kept. Then, randomly at a party, they would be a nice, normal person to earn your trust so that you would say hi to them in the halls which starts the vicious circle all over again. Those were the people who managed to seem above all the hormonal angst, and though I hated them, I respected them equally as much. These shows that Audrey watches seems to prepare her to be just that person, an asshole that commands respect. I’d rather her take that position and wrestle with who she can get the others of her exclusive circle of friends to hate more besides her, than the crap I dealt with.

She seemed to be coming along nicely too, ignoring both Erin and I when we told her to sit at the table and finish her food, hitting her sister, telling Erin that she was her favorite parent, then saying the same to me a little while later; her sense of manipulation was becoming acute. The world was her stage and we weren’t only mere actors, but really bugging her. Then today she said, “Dad, how come we have two butt-cheeks?”
“I think it’s because we need two to pinch off the farts that would squeeze out all the time.”
She thought about it solemnly for a few moments before begging for a sucker to take outside. And as she and Margo ran out the door to the neighbors swing set I thought to myself, “she’ll never make it…” and I could almost feel the ghost of my grandmother grip my shoulder re-assuringly and whisper, “Give her time…”