DadCentric

FOB Life, Everybody Needs a Thrill

I wake sometimes in the middle of the night (during those oh-dark-early hours of the morning) unsure of where I am. Confused, I reach out expecting to find my wife or one of the kids but my hand only swipes at the empty darkness. From somewhere behind the T-wall, the loud diesel knocking-whistle of an MRAP not-so-gently reminds me of where I am. The sound of the forced hot air blowing in my face only confirms it. I'm in my twin bed...in a tent...in Afghanistan. ::Sigh::

When last I wrote, we were waiting for our plane at Bagram Air Field (BAF). Like caged animals we spent four additional days pacing the transient tent that was our living quarters waiting for our flight to the FOB. This was after the initial three days we suffered through getting more training on things we'd already been trained on twice - MRAP egress, Counter-IED, counter-boredom. "It only really counts in country" we were told by the civilian contractors. Um...yeah...whatever - how's that paycheck?

Back to the transient tent. These are 500-pax (passengers) tents - the military equivalent of the petri dish that is daycare. Bunks are 12"-15" apart and each aisle is approximately 36" wide. The mattress you sleep on has been slept on by more troops than I dare imagine. It makes a No-Tell Motel look like a W Hotel. There are no linens so if you dont have your woobie or a sleeping bag, try not to think about it much and you might be able to sleep.

Laptop-shooting Dad Was Too Soft

For munitions-based parenting, you really need to start young and employ tactics of shock and awe. Like yo:

Why not give this video some love on the YouTube?

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

A couple of weeks ago, the boy and got the Geek Trip of a lifetime: the good people at 20th Century Fox invited us to spend the weekend in San Francisco on their dime, there to get a behind-the-scenes look at Skywalker Ranch and Lucasfilm Headquarters, topped off with an advance screening of Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace 3D (which opens in theaters today - my review of the flick can be found over at MamaPop).

Some of us were never bitten by the Star Wars bug, and some of us have outgrown it over the years. My enthusiasm for the prequels is lukewarm at best; they have their moments, but ultimately fell a bit short of everyone's expectations. My enthusiasm for the folks at Lucasfilm, however, remains steadfast. These guys are perhaps the biggest Star Wars fans of any of us, and when sound editing supervisor Matthew Wood (also the voice of General Grievous) let Lucas add his voice to a key scene in Episode I, well, it was pretty geektastic. 

 

Jaws Was Never My Scene, and I Don't Like Star Wars

"Dude."

It was Simmons.

"What's goin' on, man?"

"I've got some Donald Duck, dude.  Wanna go see Star Wars for a buck at Leohman's ?"

"Go see...wait...Donald Duck?" I said.

"It's blotter, dude.  I got some..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know what it is," I said.  I had never done acid before, but I knew the lexicon.  Just needed some context.  "Umm...Star Wars?  I thought they were showing 2001: A Space Oddysey." 

"No, dude, Star fuckin' Wars! Huh huh huh. C'mon, let's go!  My mom'll drive."  Star Wars had come out three years prior.

"Nah, dude," I demurred, "I gotta wash the fuckin' van today.  I can't get out of it."

"All right, loser.  Have fun," he said.  Later."

"Later." 

I walked the yellow receiver back to the kitchen, untangling fifteen feet of boinging spiral cord from the basement stairs, and clacked it onto the wall, averting my eyes from Mom's scrutiny.

Dad-A-Roni and San Francisco Treats

"I always pictured fatherhood with more long walks and insightful conversation," I said to Jason as we stood on a sidewalk along San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

Jason, of this blog fame, and I were in town for a special Star Wars event, and we had been allowed to bring one child each. We both decided to invite one of our own kids, and so it was that our two offspring were sprinting down a city sidewalk laughing at t-shirts with boobs drawn on them and hitting each other with imaginary lightsabers.

We watched them run towards the cable car and Jason said something which escapes me now, but I like to think that it had something to do with Scotch. 

And then we fell quickly into history.

The weekend was as blurry as the rest of them, but where once they spun from cheap drinks and the pursuit of them, they now spin forever forward like a time machine with the buttons stuck. Kids grow up at lightspeed, and somewhere back a dozen chapters ago I should have said something deep and meaningful. Instead I wrapped them in love-lined tangents, mixed in some melancholy metaphors, added a bit of aggravated cursing, and told them "because I said so" like it explained something. Tears, laughs, hugs, frustration, spinning on and spinning on. So many stars.

In reality, fatherhood thus far has consisted of few walks that are far between and too many conversations punctuated with all the patience of a drill sergeant. Whatever vision of fatherhood I pieced together from my own dad and a lifetime of pop culture influences isn't the same as the one my kids are receiving. I am not just a great and all-knowing dispenser of truth and solutions, but also something fallible and full of faults. My children have seen behind the curtain, and they are paying attention to the man there.

The cable car started and our sons held tight, the wind in their hair and our cameras at their side. The moment rolled up one hill and down the other, two boys lost in it and two men trying to capture it accordingly. The street flew beneath their feet, and with it the day and a fastly spinning world.

The stars were bright and nearly blinding.

Moon River Part II

Click here if you missed Part I of DadCentric's scintillating probe into the joy of colonoscopies.

The Night Before

Okay. By this point, you probably understand the basic idea behind a colonoscopy: they snake a tube with a camera stuck on the end up into your nether regions so they can figure out what (if anything) is going on in the maze of your upper and lower intestine. Of course, in order to accomplish this, they need to make damned well sure you don't have anything floating around in said digestive tract to get in the way. Which means that after you spend a day without eating... they need you to... uh... evacuate said tract. Which is why you have to guzzle a giant fucking jug of suck.

EXPERT TIP: Be sure you have full, unfettered access to a bathroom for the entirety of this evening. Warn your kids ahead of time: "This bathroom belongs to Daddy tonight. DO. NOT. GET. IN. DADDY'S. WAY."

Your doc will have given you a choice as to how to approach the gallon of Hell now sitting in your fridge. You can either drink the whole fucking the thing night before your procedure... or you can drink half of it the night before, and the other half in the morning. Unfortunately, you need to have the second half at least 4 (I think) hours before the procedure — so if you're scheduled for 9am, that means you've gotta get up at 3:30 or 4am to finish chugging your gallon of Hell. Which is stupid. Plan accordingly.

ANYHOW. Since my appointment was a 9am thing, I went the route of doing the whole gallon of Hell the night beforehand. They recommend you start at 5pm; I recommend starting even earlier (even by half an hour) if possible. Why? Because you're suposed to drink the WHOLE FUCKING GALLON OF HELL IN 8oz INCREMENTS, ONE EVERY 15-20 MINUTES. WHICH TAKES AT LEAST FOUR FUCKING HOURS.

I started at 5pm. The details are kind of sketchy for me at this point, but what follows is my rough recollection of how it went.

The House That Booty Built

The other night at dinner, my youngest child, a boy person of four years of age, declared to us in his most excited voice that he had an idea. A tense silence followed as we waited for him to tell us, for the unleashing of this new thought onto an unsuspecting world.

“I’m going to build a house out of butts!”

His big brother laughed. His mother and I snickered, our eyebrows cocked upwards in an appraising fashion. “Butts, you say? A whole house made out of butts?” The repetition of the word just incited more laughter. Fanning the flames, baby, fanning the flames.

I can picture us all, decades from now, my wife and I gray and old, riding along in the backseat of a car powered by sunflower seeds or rainwater or perhaps good intentions. Our eldest son at the wheel. “Are you sure this is the way?” my wife will ask. She’ll propose two or three different routes to get us where we’re going. 

“I know where I’m going, Mom,” he’ll say, turning up the music. 

“What is this you’re subjecting our ears to?” I’ll ask him. “I thought we instilled you with better taste than this.” 

We’ll turn down a street, then another, maybe a few more. Then, just as I’m about to ask if the nav-system has gone and gotten us lost, we’ll come around a bend and there it will stand, a sight so breathtaking that all conversation will instantly fall silent. The car’s audio system, futuristic mechanism that it is, will detect this awed hush and mute itself. My eldest will pass his hand across a panel and the car will turn into the drive and come to a halt. We’ll step out of the car – or perhaps it will gently eject us, somehow – and we’ll stand there basking in the sight of this unbelievable structure, this mass of glorious curves rising outward and upward, folding in upon one another into deep crevices...which we’ll later learn are for rainwater drainage. Form and function. 

“Mom! Dad!” His voice will snap us back into the moment. We’ll look, and there he’ll be, our youngest son standing outside the front door beneath a buttockesque overhang. “You made it!”

Hugs all around, then he beckons us inside where the wonders continue. Majestic slopes, eye-popping curvature, great giant’s handfuls of roundness greet the eye wherever it falls. It’s all rather…stirring. 

My son built this, I will think to myself. I’ll put my hand on his shoulder. 

“Son, I’m sorry I ever doubted you. This is truly amazing.”

He’ll wipe away a tear and say, “Thanks, Dad.”

Then I’ll smile and ask, “Now then, where’s the shitter?”

Moon River

As we find ourselves capitulating to adulthood and - as such - leaving childish things behind as we begin settling into the long miasma of our 30s and 40s and beyond, we menfolk come to the realization that the passage of time and growing wisdom of the ages signals an opening of doors to all manner of exciting new experiences. Some of these are even informed by the growing sense of responsibility that our new(ish) status as fathers carries with it. The necessity of life insurance is one prominent example: the sudden realization that you, too, can be worth far more dead than alive is always a guaranteed feel-good moment. A thorough familiarity with regional Emergency Rooms is another: few things in life are as certain as the fact that once you produce and begin raising offspring, they will encounter a staggering array of colorful maladies and blood-soaked accidents (who knew the human forehead could bleed so much?) that will enable you to spend massive amounts of quality time in your local ER. If you're especially lucky and/or your children are especially clumsy, you may even come to know some of the nurses on a first-name basis.

These are all - to quote father-of-twins Charlie Sheen - scientifically validated forms of "winning."

And then there is that very special form of winning we will all experience, sooner or later. The kind that happens when a man and a woman an AMA-accredited physician love each other very much have a serious discussion while sharing dinner over candlelight one of you is sitting on a sheet of paper in a small, neutrally-colored office that involves promises of eternal devotion and several bottles of red wine the words, "It probably makes sense for you to have a colonoscopy."

Ah, yes. There is it: the magic word. Colonoscopy. In which someone actually (deep breath) scopes out your colon.

And you think to yourself... really? But... dude. Seriously. Really?

At some point, the answer will be: yes, really.

Joining The Xbox Nation, Part Two

 This is the second in a three-part series of Xbox 360 Kinect reviews. Part One is here.

The boy was skeptical, as was I: would the Kinect deliver on its controller-free promise?

The answer? Sorta.

First, I had to set the thing up. The Kinect requires that you have a certain amount of floor space; our couch protruded into the thing's optimal zone, so I had to do a bit of furniture re-arranging. Not a problem for me, so much as an inconvenience; I backed it up a foot, and moved the attached ottoman over to the right side to free up the space we'd need to jump, swing our arms, and run in place. (Those of you with a small TV room, or one with a ton of furniture, beware: you might need to do some serious remodeling.) Navigating via the Kinect requires you to use different gestures, kind of like Tom Cruise does with his various future computers in Minority Report. It takes a bit of getting used to, and for younger kids, this might be frustrating, especially as the menu navigation functions can differ from one game to the next. (One suggestion: use the voice control whenever possible.)

Special Guest Dad Ben Cohen-Leadholm Takes Us Ice Fishing

Our friend and today's special guest blogger Ben Cohen-Leadholm is one of those guys that sorta pisses you off because he's thought of a gazillion awesome things to do with kids that you haven't. Ben is the author of the family activities blog Kids Are Awesome But So Am I, helping parents reclaim their mojo through kids’ activities that don’t suck. He is the co-author of Have No Career Fear: A College Grad’s Guide to Snagging a Job, Trekking the Career Path, and Reaching Job Nirvana. Find him on Twitter (@parentingmojo), Facebook (www.facebook.com/kidsactivity), and Email (blswes@gmail.com). Here, Ben has a great idea for a fun activity that'll get you outside on a cold February day: ice fishing.

Ice fishing could probably benefit from some re-branding. Because ice fishing is one of the best (and sadly misunderstood) winter activities around, especially for kids.

Think about the simple yet compelling ice fishing equation: enjoying the outdoors, appreciating nature and wildlife, hanging with family and friends, imbibing some “warming” drinks, and snagging fresh delicious fish you’ll get to eat that night. Plus, there are all the stories you’ll be telling your friends over beers (or whole milk) from the day’s adventures. So push any ice fishing stereotypes out of your mind that you might see on a show like Ice Men on the VERSUS network – those caricatures are both entertaining and ridiculous. For example, you’re not going to get frostbite, you’re not going to fall into a fishing hole, and you will not be defending your catch from bears. Promise.