Why is it that when a mother is pushing a kid in a stroller no one bothers give her a second thought yet when a father is out with his kid in a stroller he gets comments like Is Daddy babysitting today? If a woman takes her kid down to the mailbox to greet the mailman does the mailman hand her the mail with a smile and say Are you playing Mrs. Dad today? I didn't think so. Why is it then that our country can fathom electing a woman for president yet can't grasp the concept of a dad taking care of his kids?
My last babysitting gig was over several waist sizes ago and probably took place while Reagan was in office. Calling me Mr. Mom not only demeans what I do everyday but it also demeans what my wife does everyday. I know we might roll differently than you do in your family, but you know what? When my wife and I sat down to decide what was in the best interest of our household, we didn't consult you. If you see me out with my daughter I'm not babysitting her. I'm parenting her.
Even though it goes beyond emasculation (denigrating fatherhood to a high schooler who snoops through cupboards and eats from the fridge), I am not so much insulted by the babysitting comment as I am baffled by it. Does no one see the grossness in this? It's as though people who say it expect fathers to impregnate and disappear. And people wonder why so many babies are born out of wedlock? I'm not trying to alibi for so-called deadbeat dads, but maybe we need to start pointing the finger at the man in the mirror instead of the one on the Montel Williams Who's My Baby's Daddy episode.
I used to be a member of a list serve for at-home dads until I got sick of guys complaining that they and their kids weren't welcome into certain playgroups. A handbook written for at-home dads even has a letter from a guy offering advice and one of his suggestions is to not get bent out of shape when people call you Mr. Mom. But enough is enough already. It's insulting, yes, but the worst part is that people don't understand why.
The deep end is nigh and I can see myself going off it, so allow me to instead direct your attention to Mom-101 who's said it beautifully in the past. That post features a picture of her first daughter, who has a dad who stays home with her, almost two years ago. If you scan forward in her blog to present day you'll see there are more recent pictures of her, and begosh and begorrah, the kid looks like she turned out okay. Recently Denguy from Toronto responded here to two articles he found online talking about the sordid mystery surrounding at-home fatherhood and I think some similar frustration was voiced there.
Now to the defense of others I will say that although its not how we roll at our house, I do understand a presumption of a father who goes to work and a mother who stays home. That's how my siblings and I grew up, and it worked out well that way. Same goes for my wife. In the handbook I mentioned earlier in fact there's a dedication to the contributing fathers' own mothers who they say taught them how to do what they do. I would concur with that also. If I hadn't had a mother who was as effective as mine was, I don't think I would have been able to take on the role that I am right now.
My mother taught me the importance of things like reading to my child and engaging her imagination. I also credit my mother when I hear myself saying things like Look, it's 3:30 and I still haven't gotten this house clean yet and it's raining so traffic's going to be terrible and your mother's going to be in a bad mood when she gets home and I have no idea what I should make for dinner. I also usually add something like so quit screaming but I don't give my mom credit for that one. Maybe that comes from my dad's side.
You know what though? As annoying as it is to me, I'm not going to change the nation's attitude toward fatherhood in a single blog post and besides that it's now 3:30. It's not raining, but even still I've got to make the bed, get this kid a fresh diaper, and pull out our tax stuff because tonight's the night Elaine and I are going to try and figure out how we're going to put the fuck to the taxman. Come to think of it, this marks the first time I've used the F-word in my blog, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Fatherhood is not just for Michael Keaton anymore.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The day I joined the circus
My wife has always held a certain affection for circuses, and while when we travel we don't necessarily go out of our way to look for one, we are quick to buy tickets once we spot one. Not counting Ringling Brothers and Cirque du Soleil which we've seen here at home, we've sat under the big top in France, Belgium and Hungary. While the circus in Budapest offered the most as far as animal exploitainment went (ice skating polar bears and kittens doing "tricks"), the Bouglione Circus we saw in Belgium was truly the greatest show on Earth, not just because I got to take part in it but because of the way Elaine and I got there.
Belgium is not really one but two separate countries, one part speaking French and the other speaking Dutch. While my Dutch is limited to the restaurant basics of red wine, white wine and check please, most Dutch speakers also speak some degree of English which made vacationing in a Dutch-speaking country easy. Even still, Elaine and I found ourselves venturing into the francophone Walloon region where I could dust off my college major. Sometimes we even went as far as northern France or into Luxembourg for the same reason. When we were strolling through Namur and spotted the poster advertising ticket sales for the Bouglione Circus at a nearby record shop, we took note of the directions and headed to the store.
Actually the purpose of visiting this record shop quickly became twofold when Elaine wanted to know if I could ask if they sold a CD by Princess Superstar. No matter that neither of us had heard of Princess Superstar before seeing her rap Bad Babysitter on Belgian MTV. Elaine still liked the song. It turns out Princess Superstar is American, but tended to fare better on the UK charts. Listen to the song, and I dare say you'll discover why. I did inquire, but the shop owner, to his credit, did not stock anything by Princess Superstar. Alas.
I had no problem scoring our tickets for the show that day but the proprietor of the record store explained that the circus started shortly and asked if we knew how to get there. We did not, and even with my wife's map reading abilities being as good as they are, I was worried that either my translation skills or my pisspoor sense of direction might get in the way of us arriving on time. And as parking spaces are a rare commodity in old European towns, we were probably at least a mile or so from the car at this point. Lucky for us, a woman in the store was sympathetic to our plight.
"If you need a ride, I'd be happy to give you lift," the woman said in her native French.
"We don't want to impose," I said in my broken French.
"It's no problem, " she assured us, "it's on our way home."
With that, her daughter, who must have been all of nine or ten years old, left the CDs in the pop music section and joined her mother's side smiling.
Now, of my wife and I, I am probably the gutsier of the two when it comes to forgoing stranger danger. I've picked up hitchhikers, I've accepted a ride from a stranger in order to fill an empty gas can and I don't mind striking up conversations in the checkout line at the grocery store. My wife on the other hand will typically not exchange more than three words with the guy sitting next to her on an airplane for fear that he end up wanting to make a woman suit out of her skin while Precious gnaws on chicken bones and the song Goodbye Horses plays in the background. My wife's not a size 14 by the way -- I'm just using this as an example. Regardless, being in a foreign country somehow invites you to let your guard down and when you come from one of the most violent countries on the planet, as we Americans do, you just are quick to bank on a mom and her kid in a record store not being serial killers. So we took them up on the offer.
Elaine and I sat in the backseat. Obviously the mom drove and the girl sat in the passenger seat next to her facing backward toward us for the duration of the ride. The daughter wanted to know where we were from, and when we told her we were American she asked us what the American euro looked like. The mother explained to her daughter that the United States, not being party to the European Union, did not have a euro coin. Then she explained to us that her daughter collected the different coins from the -- at that time 12 but now 27 -- member nations. Bully for her, I thought, for taking an interest in the Union and its currency. After all it was Belgium along with Holland and Luxembourg that invented the concept of the European Union back in the 1950s.
I pulled a dollar from my wallet and offered it to her as a euro substitute. The mother tried to politely refuse the offering, but when I assured her that it was essentially the same value as a euro coin, she let her daughter keep it. Interestingly enough, when I gave her that dollar back in April of 2002, had she traded me for a one-euro coin, I would have gotten the short end of the stick, having exchanged a dollar for what was equivalent at the time to a mere 85 cents. Were we to each have held on to our traded monies however until 2008, that kid would have taken a bath and I would have increased my investment by more than 50%. Ah, the curse of hindsight!
After a brief conversation and for the mere price of one US dollar, the mother-and-daughter team dropped us off at our destination just a short walk from the big top of the Bouglione Circus. Elaine forced me to pose for a picture with the two of them, and I obliged. The mother and I shared that we didn't much care for having our picture taken, but the daughter seemed to relish the opportunity. We exchanged email addresses as is the custom in the post-Y2K era and went on our respective ways.
Once Elaine and I presented our tickets we were escorted to our seats. Worth noting is that while the role of the venue usher has been all but quashed here in America, it's still taken seriously throughout Europe. The person who shows you where you sit expects a tip. Having already been party to a circus in Provence I was well aware of this, but another guy who was from who-knows-where refused and the scantily-clad shapely carny just stood there with her hand out asking, "De la service pour moi, monsieur?" until she reluctantly gave up and tended to other customers. I gave; He didn't. Guess who was asked to come on stage?
It was the last act before intermission and a very animated ringmaster was recruiting four volunteers slash victims to come down to the center ring, me being the fourth. There were four small stools, each about a foot high, arranged in a square and we were to each have a seat on one of them. I sat facing one direction while the guy across from me sat facing the other such that his left side was facing my left side. The other two guys were instructed to do the same so that each of us was sitting perpendicularly to the guys closets to us and each of our backs was to someone else's stool.
Being on center stage in a big top makes for quite an interesting perspective. For one thing it smells different than it does when you're sitting up in the stands. Sure, back in my original seat I enjoyed being surrounded by the aroma of cotton candy and my wife's sugared popcorn, but once on stage I had to breathe through my mouth just to avoid smelling the sawdust and animal dung. Spotlights shone on me also so even though I couldn't really make out anyone's face in the audience because of the glare, I knew that all eyes were now on me, so I didn't want to do anything to make me look goofy. Well, at least no goofier than I already looked sitting catty corner to three other guys in the middle of sawdust and circus excrement.
The ringmaster motioned for us to raise our hands above our heads, demonstrating with his own arms what he wanted us to do. Then he walked around our formation making small adjustments to our arms, basically just making a show and building suspense for the audience. Once he was satisfied with our posture he quickly went back around the circle only now as he passed each of us he put one hand on our forehead and took us by the hand with the other. As a slide whistle from the band played a descending glissando, the ringmaster gently pushed us backward so that now each of us, while still perched on our respective stools, was leaning back with our heads in the lap of some other guy we didn't know from Adam. So much for not looking goofy.
The audience loved this judging by the sound of their laughter and as silly as I might have felt I was chuckling too. So were my other three costars, one of whom made some comment in French I couldn't quite make out. Though socially awkward so far it was a pretty easy stunt to perform. Then there was a drum roll that I knew must have been foreshadowing some show-stopping feat that was going to involve the four of us. Indeed I was correct.
Again the ringmaster paraded around the four of us as the band's percussionist continued his drum roll and watched for his cue. Then, accompanied by the crash of a cymbal, the ringmaster swiped the stool out from under the first guy and tossed it aside. Guy number two? Same thing. Again with three and finally me. There we were, four strangers with our heads resting on one another's laps and each of our weight being supported by the guy whose lap we were laying in. More audience laughter.
Holding this pose wasn't terribly uncomfortable at first, but I could tell from the moment the last stool, mine, was removed from the equation that I was going to be limited in the time my leg muscles would endure this. This slight tension reminded me of a high school gym class exercise a coach would make us do where we had to sit with out backs up against a wall and our thighs parallel to the floor. I hadn't thought to size up the other three guys to see if maybe there was one of them who was less fit than I was, but somehow I doubted it. I'm not one of those self-deprecating Americans that thinks of Europeans as somehow more cultured and better than us, but they are on the whole more physically fit.
None of this would have mattered except that because I'm rather fair skinned and these guys were all three swarthy complected, I knew any audience member could have easily pegged me as the American in the group. I might have gotten away with passing for British, but Brits tend to wear clothes that look more like what the rest of Europeans wears while I wear typical American clothes with the signature Turget circles. To put it succinctly, I didn't want to be the weakest link in the chain whose knees buckled first. It was a matter of national integrity.
Apparently I was not alone in my patriotism. The other three men held out as long as I did. And so after about ten seconds, which apparently was starting to cut into the scheduled intermission time, a handler brought out an elephant into the ring. There was more laughter and applause from the audience which might have served as stamina for my staying power, but lucky for my legs another one of my three allies gave in. Because this formation is only as strong as the weakest link the rest of us lost our balance and came toppling down. Yet more laughter, more applause and then the music cued the intermission.
Elaine and I looked for souvenirs but the only things offered as I recall were children's toys that either sparkled or made noise. Nothing that denoted the circus we had gone to and basically all things that you could have bought at any circus on the planet. No posters to be found which is what we were hoping for. My wife was sure to snap several pictures though.
Once the circus was over Elaine and I decided it was time for dinner. After a leisurely walk down the hill which thankfully was guided by a Scottish woman who lived in the area with her Belgian husband, we found our way to a restaurant there in town called Brasserie Henry located at 3 place Saint-Aubain. Their business card also has a website which I'd link to if it still worked but apparently it doesn't. Oh wait, the powers of the google have led me to discover Brasserie Henry now has its own domain name. You can check them out by pointing your web browser to brasseriehenry.net. This place must be popular because we hadn't so much as sat down for five minutes before a large group came filing in. Then Elaine said, "Hey, aren't those the people from the circus?'
I wasn't quite sure at first but once I pictured these diners in glitter and grease paint I realized that Elaine was right. Indeed several of the performers from Cirque Bouglione were dining alongside us at this same restaurant. Always the table hopper, I didn't hesitate to go over to thank them for a such a wonderful time. We chatted briefly. One woman also spoke good English and was quick to tell me when I get home I should see her son who was at that time performing in a circus in New York. To outsiders, when you introduce yourself as American they often think New York is right around the corner and Hollywood is down the street.
Circuses do have a certain allure about them that I think is due not just to their entertainment value but also to the mystique they carry. I know some would find it unbecoming to travel in trailers and live around exotic animals. Some people I know couldn't get past having to attend weekly meetings with guys in bright wigs and floppy shoes. I on the other hand have always thought it would be an adventure to run away and join the circus. Sadly though I don't think there's much call for a contortionist whose abilities are limited to putting his feet behind his head and turning his tongue all the way around. Nor is anyone I know looking to hire a not-so-strong man. There's always the band.
Did I mention I can play the slide whistle?
Belgium is not really one but two separate countries, one part speaking French and the other speaking Dutch. While my Dutch is limited to the restaurant basics of red wine, white wine and check please, most Dutch speakers also speak some degree of English which made vacationing in a Dutch-speaking country easy. Even still, Elaine and I found ourselves venturing into the francophone Walloon region where I could dust off my college major. Sometimes we even went as far as northern France or into Luxembourg for the same reason. When we were strolling through Namur and spotted the poster advertising ticket sales for the Bouglione Circus at a nearby record shop, we took note of the directions and headed to the store.
Actually the purpose of visiting this record shop quickly became twofold when Elaine wanted to know if I could ask if they sold a CD by Princess Superstar. No matter that neither of us had heard of Princess Superstar before seeing her rap Bad Babysitter on Belgian MTV. Elaine still liked the song. It turns out Princess Superstar is American, but tended to fare better on the UK charts. Listen to the song, and I dare say you'll discover why. I did inquire, but the shop owner, to his credit, did not stock anything by Princess Superstar. Alas.
I had no problem scoring our tickets for the show that day but the proprietor of the record store explained that the circus started shortly and asked if we knew how to get there. We did not, and even with my wife's map reading abilities being as good as they are, I was worried that either my translation skills or my pisspoor sense of direction might get in the way of us arriving on time. And as parking spaces are a rare commodity in old European towns, we were probably at least a mile or so from the car at this point. Lucky for us, a woman in the store was sympathetic to our plight.
"If you need a ride, I'd be happy to give you lift," the woman said in her native French.
"We don't want to impose," I said in my broken French.
"It's no problem, " she assured us, "it's on our way home."
With that, her daughter, who must have been all of nine or ten years old, left the CDs in the pop music section and joined her mother's side smiling.
Now, of my wife and I, I am probably the gutsier of the two when it comes to forgoing stranger danger. I've picked up hitchhikers, I've accepted a ride from a stranger in order to fill an empty gas can and I don't mind striking up conversations in the checkout line at the grocery store. My wife on the other hand will typically not exchange more than three words with the guy sitting next to her on an airplane for fear that he end up wanting to make a woman suit out of her skin while Precious gnaws on chicken bones and the song Goodbye Horses plays in the background. My wife's not a size 14 by the way -- I'm just using this as an example. Regardless, being in a foreign country somehow invites you to let your guard down and when you come from one of the most violent countries on the planet, as we Americans do, you just are quick to bank on a mom and her kid in a record store not being serial killers. So we took them up on the offer.
Elaine and I sat in the backseat. Obviously the mom drove and the girl sat in the passenger seat next to her facing backward toward us for the duration of the ride. The daughter wanted to know where we were from, and when we told her we were American she asked us what the American euro looked like. The mother explained to her daughter that the United States, not being party to the European Union, did not have a euro coin. Then she explained to us that her daughter collected the different coins from the -- at that time 12 but now 27 -- member nations. Bully for her, I thought, for taking an interest in the Union and its currency. After all it was Belgium along with Holland and Luxembourg that invented the concept of the European Union back in the 1950s.
I pulled a dollar from my wallet and offered it to her as a euro substitute. The mother tried to politely refuse the offering, but when I assured her that it was essentially the same value as a euro coin, she let her daughter keep it. Interestingly enough, when I gave her that dollar back in April of 2002, had she traded me for a one-euro coin, I would have gotten the short end of the stick, having exchanged a dollar for what was equivalent at the time to a mere 85 cents. Were we to each have held on to our traded monies however until 2008, that kid would have taken a bath and I would have increased my investment by more than 50%. Ah, the curse of hindsight!
After a brief conversation and for the mere price of one US dollar, the mother-and-daughter team dropped us off at our destination just a short walk from the big top of the Bouglione Circus. Elaine forced me to pose for a picture with the two of them, and I obliged. The mother and I shared that we didn't much care for having our picture taken, but the daughter seemed to relish the opportunity. We exchanged email addresses as is the custom in the post-Y2K era and went on our respective ways.
Once Elaine and I presented our tickets we were escorted to our seats. Worth noting is that while the role of the venue usher has been all but quashed here in America, it's still taken seriously throughout Europe. The person who shows you where you sit expects a tip. Having already been party to a circus in Provence I was well aware of this, but another guy who was from who-knows-where refused and the scantily-clad shapely carny just stood there with her hand out asking, "De la service pour moi, monsieur?" until she reluctantly gave up and tended to other customers. I gave; He didn't. Guess who was asked to come on stage?
It was the last act before intermission and a very animated ringmaster was recruiting four volunteers slash victims to come down to the center ring, me being the fourth. There were four small stools, each about a foot high, arranged in a square and we were to each have a seat on one of them. I sat facing one direction while the guy across from me sat facing the other such that his left side was facing my left side. The other two guys were instructed to do the same so that each of us was sitting perpendicularly to the guys closets to us and each of our backs was to someone else's stool.
Being on center stage in a big top makes for quite an interesting perspective. For one thing it smells different than it does when you're sitting up in the stands. Sure, back in my original seat I enjoyed being surrounded by the aroma of cotton candy and my wife's sugared popcorn, but once on stage I had to breathe through my mouth just to avoid smelling the sawdust and animal dung. Spotlights shone on me also so even though I couldn't really make out anyone's face in the audience because of the glare, I knew that all eyes were now on me, so I didn't want to do anything to make me look goofy. Well, at least no goofier than I already looked sitting catty corner to three other guys in the middle of sawdust and circus excrement.
The ringmaster motioned for us to raise our hands above our heads, demonstrating with his own arms what he wanted us to do. Then he walked around our formation making small adjustments to our arms, basically just making a show and building suspense for the audience. Once he was satisfied with our posture he quickly went back around the circle only now as he passed each of us he put one hand on our forehead and took us by the hand with the other. As a slide whistle from the band played a descending glissando, the ringmaster gently pushed us backward so that now each of us, while still perched on our respective stools, was leaning back with our heads in the lap of some other guy we didn't know from Adam. So much for not looking goofy.
The audience loved this judging by the sound of their laughter and as silly as I might have felt I was chuckling too. So were my other three costars, one of whom made some comment in French I couldn't quite make out. Though socially awkward so far it was a pretty easy stunt to perform. Then there was a drum roll that I knew must have been foreshadowing some show-stopping feat that was going to involve the four of us. Indeed I was correct.
Again the ringmaster paraded around the four of us as the band's percussionist continued his drum roll and watched for his cue. Then, accompanied by the crash of a cymbal, the ringmaster swiped the stool out from under the first guy and tossed it aside. Guy number two? Same thing. Again with three and finally me. There we were, four strangers with our heads resting on one another's laps and each of our weight being supported by the guy whose lap we were laying in. More audience laughter.
Holding this pose wasn't terribly uncomfortable at first, but I could tell from the moment the last stool, mine, was removed from the equation that I was going to be limited in the time my leg muscles would endure this. This slight tension reminded me of a high school gym class exercise a coach would make us do where we had to sit with out backs up against a wall and our thighs parallel to the floor. I hadn't thought to size up the other three guys to see if maybe there was one of them who was less fit than I was, but somehow I doubted it. I'm not one of those self-deprecating Americans that thinks of Europeans as somehow more cultured and better than us, but they are on the whole more physically fit.
None of this would have mattered except that because I'm rather fair skinned and these guys were all three swarthy complected, I knew any audience member could have easily pegged me as the American in the group. I might have gotten away with passing for British, but Brits tend to wear clothes that look more like what the rest of Europeans wears while I wear typical American clothes with the signature Turget circles. To put it succinctly, I didn't want to be the weakest link in the chain whose knees buckled first. It was a matter of national integrity.
Apparently I was not alone in my patriotism. The other three men held out as long as I did. And so after about ten seconds, which apparently was starting to cut into the scheduled intermission time, a handler brought out an elephant into the ring. There was more laughter and applause from the audience which might have served as stamina for my staying power, but lucky for my legs another one of my three allies gave in. Because this formation is only as strong as the weakest link the rest of us lost our balance and came toppling down. Yet more laughter, more applause and then the music cued the intermission.
Elaine and I looked for souvenirs but the only things offered as I recall were children's toys that either sparkled or made noise. Nothing that denoted the circus we had gone to and basically all things that you could have bought at any circus on the planet. No posters to be found which is what we were hoping for. My wife was sure to snap several pictures though.
Once the circus was over Elaine and I decided it was time for dinner. After a leisurely walk down the hill which thankfully was guided by a Scottish woman who lived in the area with her Belgian husband, we found our way to a restaurant there in town called Brasserie Henry located at 3 place Saint-Aubain. Their business card also has a website which I'd link to if it still worked but apparently it doesn't. Oh wait, the powers of the google have led me to discover Brasserie Henry now has its own domain name. You can check them out by pointing your web browser to brasseriehenry.net. This place must be popular because we hadn't so much as sat down for five minutes before a large group came filing in. Then Elaine said, "Hey, aren't those the people from the circus?'
I wasn't quite sure at first but once I pictured these diners in glitter and grease paint I realized that Elaine was right. Indeed several of the performers from Cirque Bouglione were dining alongside us at this same restaurant. Always the table hopper, I didn't hesitate to go over to thank them for a such a wonderful time. We chatted briefly. One woman also spoke good English and was quick to tell me when I get home I should see her son who was at that time performing in a circus in New York. To outsiders, when you introduce yourself as American they often think New York is right around the corner and Hollywood is down the street.
Circuses do have a certain allure about them that I think is due not just to their entertainment value but also to the mystique they carry. I know some would find it unbecoming to travel in trailers and live around exotic animals. Some people I know couldn't get past having to attend weekly meetings with guys in bright wigs and floppy shoes. I on the other hand have always thought it would be an adventure to run away and join the circus. Sadly though I don't think there's much call for a contortionist whose abilities are limited to putting his feet behind his head and turning his tongue all the way around. Nor is anyone I know looking to hire a not-so-strong man. There's always the band.
Did I mention I can play the slide whistle?
Monday, February 25, 2008
Becoming her bad father
I am quickly becoming the father I had hoped not to become. Sure my daughter and I are sitting side by side. She is standing up on the couch next to me with her arm on my shoulder. She is happy; I am happy. She's smiling, and I'm smiling.
Why?
The reason is because I am typing away on my laptop and she is looking at television. She was never immune to television, but I had hoped we could keep it a treat that only reared its ugly head when she went to go visit family or friends. I am not one of those people who thinks there are quality TV shows for children. All shows reflect varying degrees of badness, especially when it comes to children sitting in front of them. Television teaches children that everything should be entertaining and fun. Then when they are put into situations that are not entertaining and fun they get bored. Compare hours of television viewing and Ritalin sales in this country to other Western nations and see what kind of correlation you come up with. Also worth noting is the number of kids who win national competitions like the spelling bee or science bowl who also don't have a television set in their home.
OK, enough preaching. On with bloggery.
Today Meryl decided that she did not want to eat her breakfast at the dining room table where we normally eats. She wanted to head down the hall to eat her cereal bar in front of the boob tube. Because she already woke us up at five in the morning and my wife's car wouldn't start which caused further household upheaval, I just wasn't up for fighting a battle that early in the day. I acquiesced and here we are. I'm not telling you this because I think it's OK to plunk kids down in front of a TV set. I'm confessing so that I feel shame and maybe will then have the energy to get up and do something else.
Because I do think if I am going to minimize the badness my kid sees on television I should at least limit her viewing to things that have a marginal amount of educational value, we have begun watching some shows on PBS. Here's what I don't like about each of her favorite shows.
BARNIE AND FRIENDS- Why this guy is still on television after all these years is beyond me. Apparently his handlers changed his medication somewhere in the series because he's not as manic anymore and now he's easier to understand than when the show first debuted. Baby Bop also seems to have acquired more of a vocabulary and no longer babbles incoherently the way she used to. Even still this show just seems like one goob fest after another.
CAILLOU - Caillou is an animated Canuck who at the age of four goes around whining like an incompetent boob because he can't do all the things that the big kids can do. And he has no hair! Both his parents have hair. His grandfather has hair. Is there some genetic disorder about Caillou we don't know about? Is it something we'll have to figure out after having put together unrelated clues kinda like on Lost? This shouldn't bother me but it does.
CLIFFORD - Clifford, if you're reading this, it's not you. It's that cocky Emily Elizabeth who tries on every episode to usurp your stardom. If you are asked to do another season with her on the show, you need a new agent.
SUPER WHY - This is by far Meryl's favorite program. For those not in the know Super Why, Wyatt being his Clark Kent name, is one of the Super Readers along with Princess Presto, Wonder Red and Alpha Pig. Sure, they like to think they teach reading and all, but I have some problems with this show.
Why are three human beings running around Storybook Village with an anthropomorphic pig? Furthermore Alpha Pig is really the one who has most of the super power. Super Why just gets most of the credit because he's the one who plays captain exposition for all the slow kids who couldn't otherwise follow the storyline and then wraps up the show at the end. Super Why always provides the moral and gives the shakedown to the archetype, be it the big bad wolf or the witch or whoever.
Super Why does have a catchy theme song though, and I find myself borrowing lines from the show occasionally. When Meryl won't sit on the potty because the kid's been on a potty strike now for months, I'll refer to her potty seat as a Y-flyer which is what the super readers use to get from one place to another quickly. Or yesterday I shouted as I was taking off her diaper Super Meryl with the power to potty! She wasn't convinced.
Alright, show's over. The mush factor in our brains has just jumped three more points. Not only that, but people who complain about the quality of what's on television annoy me almost as much as the shows themselves. The solution isn't a microchip in the TV or, worse yet, relying on our government or third parties to tell us what's good and what's not.
The solution is turning the television off.
Why?
The reason is because I am typing away on my laptop and she is looking at television. She was never immune to television, but I had hoped we could keep it a treat that only reared its ugly head when she went to go visit family or friends. I am not one of those people who thinks there are quality TV shows for children. All shows reflect varying degrees of badness, especially when it comes to children sitting in front of them. Television teaches children that everything should be entertaining and fun. Then when they are put into situations that are not entertaining and fun they get bored. Compare hours of television viewing and Ritalin sales in this country to other Western nations and see what kind of correlation you come up with. Also worth noting is the number of kids who win national competitions like the spelling bee or science bowl who also don't have a television set in their home.
OK, enough preaching. On with bloggery.
Today Meryl decided that she did not want to eat her breakfast at the dining room table where we normally eats. She wanted to head down the hall to eat her cereal bar in front of the boob tube. Because she already woke us up at five in the morning and my wife's car wouldn't start which caused further household upheaval, I just wasn't up for fighting a battle that early in the day. I acquiesced and here we are. I'm not telling you this because I think it's OK to plunk kids down in front of a TV set. I'm confessing so that I feel shame and maybe will then have the energy to get up and do something else.
Because I do think if I am going to minimize the badness my kid sees on television I should at least limit her viewing to things that have a marginal amount of educational value, we have begun watching some shows on PBS. Here's what I don't like about each of her favorite shows.
BARNIE AND FRIENDS- Why this guy is still on television after all these years is beyond me. Apparently his handlers changed his medication somewhere in the series because he's not as manic anymore and now he's easier to understand than when the show first debuted. Baby Bop also seems to have acquired more of a vocabulary and no longer babbles incoherently the way she used to. Even still this show just seems like one goob fest after another.
CAILLOU - Caillou is an animated Canuck who at the age of four goes around whining like an incompetent boob because he can't do all the things that the big kids can do. And he has no hair! Both his parents have hair. His grandfather has hair. Is there some genetic disorder about Caillou we don't know about? Is it something we'll have to figure out after having put together unrelated clues kinda like on Lost? This shouldn't bother me but it does.
CLIFFORD - Clifford, if you're reading this, it's not you. It's that cocky Emily Elizabeth who tries on every episode to usurp your stardom. If you are asked to do another season with her on the show, you need a new agent.
SUPER WHY - This is by far Meryl's favorite program. For those not in the know Super Why, Wyatt being his Clark Kent name, is one of the Super Readers along with Princess Presto, Wonder Red and Alpha Pig. Sure, they like to think they teach reading and all, but I have some problems with this show.
Why are three human beings running around Storybook Village with an anthropomorphic pig? Furthermore Alpha Pig is really the one who has most of the super power. Super Why just gets most of the credit because he's the one who plays captain exposition for all the slow kids who couldn't otherwise follow the storyline and then wraps up the show at the end. Super Why always provides the moral and gives the shakedown to the archetype, be it the big bad wolf or the witch or whoever.
Super Why does have a catchy theme song though, and I find myself borrowing lines from the show occasionally. When Meryl won't sit on the potty because the kid's been on a potty strike now for months, I'll refer to her potty seat as a Y-flyer which is what the super readers use to get from one place to another quickly. Or yesterday I shouted as I was taking off her diaper Super Meryl with the power to potty! She wasn't convinced.
Alright, show's over. The mush factor in our brains has just jumped three more points. Not only that, but people who complain about the quality of what's on television annoy me almost as much as the shows themselves. The solution isn't a microchip in the TV or, worse yet, relying on our government or third parties to tell us what's good and what's not.
The solution is turning the television off.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Antofagasta : Where happy feet and yankees meet
On two occasions I got the opportunity to visit Antofagasta, Chile while my father was working with their major electricity provider down there. Chile is a long skinny country spanning the western coast of South America, and Antofagasta finds itself in almost the northernmost tip. Elaine and I weren't yet married but my parents were kind enough to invite her to come along as well which made Chile our first and second overseas trips together.Each time we stayed there we lived the life of the Anglo expat. We ate homemade empanadas and drank pisco sours. My dad rented a house that was the former home of a previous Miss Chile and it came complete with some fine antique furniture, including a pair of velvety cushioned throne-like chairs. Rumor had it that one of the chairs had been loaned to the Vatican during the Pope's visit to the country in 1987. We didn't know which one, so we made sure to sit in both of them so that maybe we could pick up some of His Holiness's papal super powers. Additionally one of the neighborhood stray cats pegged us as the animal-loving softies that we are and adopted us as her new owners at least for the duration of our stay. We named her Chica.
One of the most memorable brushes with wildlife I had though while in Chile was during a tour my dad had arranged with a local fisherman who had one of his underlings take us out on his boat. We went maybe a mile or so off the coast of a smaller less affluent town called Mejillones. There were six of us in the group: my mother and father, my older niece, a bilingual coworker of my dad's and Elaine and I. Plus the fisherman's underling himself so that made seven.
We all strapped on life vests and climbed into the boat. Somehow my dad managed to bump into the fisherman when he was trying to steady the boat for us to make it easier to get in, and the fisherman fell into the drink. He quickly climbed back up onto the dock and tried to profess that it was not my father's fault. While I don't think any of us said otherwise, we all thought that it was. We managed to all board the boat just the same and were off to what would later come to be known in our family folklore as Penguin Island.
Penguin Island was just that, an island that was home mainly to penguins. Sure, they also had a few seals and gulls because the mor liberal penguins refused to build the fence, but the island was basically a chunk of volcanic rock covered from one end to the other with penguins and penguin excrement. Big penguins, small penguins and penguins of every size in between. I can tell you from personal experience that penguins are loud and penguins smell.
The part of the journey that most stays with me to this day though occurred after my dad's coworker had the boat captain turn off the motor. Once the engine was silenced there was a peaceful and yet awe-inspiring calm that I cannot readily describe. We were floating along the western side of Penguin Island so the mainland was out of our view. There was nothing but ocean, island and us. For a brief moment it seemed like nothing else mattered anyway. Nothing existed outside of our narrow perception.
I don't just mean there were no bills to pay and no bosses to answer to (after all mine was still on the boat.) What I mean is that somehow for those few minutes of my life I had no obligation, certainly no luxury, but most importantly no overbearing external stimuli to preoccupy my thoughts. This sounds silly I know but it was also as though I had no national identity. No Americans; no Chileans. No Bush, no Pinochet, no Castro, no Chavez. We were just seven people out on a boat. Money didn't have much meaning either. If we started to sink, no dollar amount could have bought us salvation and besides, the view and the sounds and the smells were all priceless.
In a sense that boat ride is as close as I've ever come to time travel also. Upon gazing around at the ocean, the island, the penguins, and the gulls and smelling the salt of the sea and the shit of the seals it dawned on me that of all the things around me, we, the seven human beings on that boat, were the only things in the picture that didn't belong. We were that thing that's not like the other. We were the interlopers. This small portion of the planet probably looked the same as it did thousands of years ago with one small exception. Us. We were looking at the majestic past.
My wife and I still talk about Chile sometimes. La Portada, the Shell Boy of Mejillones and Wally's Pub will always have special meaning to us, but at the same time we doubt we will ever return. That's a pity because Chile is probably one of the few remaining places on the planet where the dollar still has a good degree of purchasing power and we found Chileans ranked topnotch when it came to hospitality. It's just that our time on this planet is short and there's a lot of this planet still left to see. Somehow I don't know that I could convince a one-year-old that a nine-hour plane ride to Santiago and then another 3-hour flight to Antofagasta would make penguins worth the trouble.
Whenever I visit the ocean I like to dip my hand down into the water and taste it. A year ago I went to a wedding in Mendocino, California just north of San Francisco and I sampled their shore in the same fashion. As the salty water washed over my lips and down my throat I looked up at my wife smiling and said, "Tastes like Chile."
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Chinese cuts, the ancient art of the no scalpel vasectomy
This is going to be a very special episode of cocktailswithkevin so if there are kids watching, you might want to ask them to leave the room.
No, there are no graphic pictures forthcoming, so there'll be nothing that will require any library staff member to employ the shoulder tap. It's just that I'm likely to forgo clinical terms and instead employ such slanguistic gems as balls, nutsack, and peepee used as a noun. As far as the vas deferens is concerned I'll probably just refer to it by its proper name, as I can think of no four-letter substitute.
Also seeing as how this post will be mainly about my down there and, depending upon how well you know me, you may not want to hear anymore about my down there than you likely already have, this may be an ideal time to go check email instead. If you do not know me well enough to know the history of my nether regions and are feeling left out, you can learn more about it by clicking hither or yon. Enjoy.
Alright. Are those kiddies gone now? Good. Oh, wait. That one kid's still peeking around the corner. Also, if you're at work, make sure you don't read words like balls and nutsack out loud.
Speaking of out loud, in the waiting room at the urologist's office I sat next to one of those people who likes to take advantage of the lengthy wait time by sharing her medical history with anyone who would listen, me included. To her credit she was also quick to talk about what a good doctor the urologist was. I don't mean to be judgmental, but I'm just gonna say it. This woman was what we like to call Ivory Recycling.
When her immediate audience stopped feigning interest she dialed up someone on her cell phone and spoke volume ten to him about it. Annoyingly enough, the call recipient also spoke volume ten so everyone in the waiting room could hear him express the sympathies this woman was clearly seeking. As far as I'm concerned the less I know about someone else's kidney stones the better. I felt like saying Get a blog, lady. But I didn't because that would have been rude, and y'all know I'm not like that.
I had been instructed to bring an athletic supporter as well as the consent form bearing signatures of both me and my wife which I did. The consent form started out with I [write your name] being of -- and then there was a blank line. I asked the receptionist if I was supposed to have written something here such as "questionable moral character" or "low social standing", but she informed me that instead "sound mind and body" would do. So I wrote them words on that paper and handed it to her.
As I was thumbing through outdated magazines trying to pass the time I noticed a patient emerging from the exam rooms making his way to the checkout desk where he was then provided two prescriptions and a plastic cup in which to bring back a specimen in six to eight weeks. Having previously been childless and needing to undergo chemotherapy, I also was familiar with the plastic cup, so I already knew what he would eventually discover, namely that making love to it is about as fun as it sounds. Oh well. By the stunned look on this guy's face, ejaculation was probably the last thing on his mind.
When this guy walked back out into the waiting room I could see that he was wearing sweatpants. My wife made me pack some too, but I left them out in the car. If you're going to be impotent, you ought to look impotent. Get it?
A nurse finally escorted me back to an exam room and instructed me to undress from the waist down, climb up on the table and cover my nakedness with what was essentially a Kleenex the size of a throw rug. This was more than sixty anxiety-riddled minutes after my scheduled appointment time and easily another ten minutes before I would finally see the doctor. I just rested on the exam table alternating between sitting up and lying back. Two large gooseneck lamps shown down on my paper-draped peepee.
Hey, I warned you I was gonna say peepee.
The nurse eventually came back in, put on gloves and announced that she was now going to see, as she put it, how well I shaved. With that she lifted up the paper tarp and rearranged me so she coud fully inspect the surgical area. I couldn't help but chuckle at her phraseology.
"I think I nicked myself. Is that points off?" I asked.
She said that normally it would be but since my scrotum was free of blood I was still okay. Then she disappeared for a while before coming back in announcing that her next task was to clean my scrotum. Note here I'm using clinical terminology only because that's what she said. At the doctor's they say scrotum. They don't say nutsack and stuff like that.
Again she rearranged my man parts and scrubbed down my business with baby wipes. This time she put on latex gloves which is fine with me. I'm not really into latex gloves but whatever. Besides while I'm sure she gave the guy with the cup a good washing too, I do feel more comfortable knowing she changed gloves in between so I don't get his cooties. Before she left this time she got another paper throw rug and tied two of its corners to the gooseneck lamps to act as a screen.
Finally the doctor entered the room and greeted me. I have a good rapport with my urologist because I've seen him several times over the past few years. After Meryl was born, I visited his office just to show her off to him. On my most recent consultation with him he gave me a hug. Not this time though. We were separated from each other by a makeshift privacy screen and I was pantless to boot.
There was some polite small talk and he asked me if we were really gonna do this. I said we were and so the agreement was made.
Much like at the dentist office when the dentist is drilling directly into your nerve endings and he tries to fake some pointless conversation with the false hopes of taking your mind off the procedure, so did my urologist attempt to fake me out by asking about my wife and kid. I was polite and responded but quickly tried to change the subject to the woman in the waiting room who was singing his praises. More specifically I just wanted him to know that people out front were talking favorably about him. I guess deep down I had hoped this would somehow encourage him to make the procedure more pleasurable.
Fat chance.
He continued the banter and promptly grabbed my one remaining testicle so he could fidget around with it and find the vas deferens. Now up until this point my down there medical repertoire included having my nuts jostled, my epididymis squeezed and even a testicle outright removed and never before had I experienced as much discomfort as when this guy was rooting around in my nutsack trying to find the spermadic chord.
I don't know that there's much he could have done to make it more pleasant either. I think regardless of how skilled the physician is, if someone's fishing for such a sensitive part of your reproductive system through your scrotum aka nutsack it just hurts like a sonofabitch. Come to think of it it was kinda like the sharp pain a guy gets from landing wrong on a bicycle seat after having jumped the Grand Canyon. Just not good.
Then came the injection. At least I think that's what came next. You see while I tried to keep up the pretense of discernible conversation with this man, things from this point on just started to blur. I never lost consciousness or anything (try as I might have). It's just that one loses all concern for polite protocol and social graces when his man parts are being knocked about, especially when the person doing the knocking isn't some highly paid woman in black latex saying bad boy bad boy. I've just heard. I don't know from experience or anything.
But really, I remember the doctor saying I would feel a pinch and a burn, the pinch being from the needle going in and the burn being from the medicine entering the site of the injection. While this wasn't nearly as painful as the previous game of Here-We-Go-Round-My-Gonad, it was at this point that I started to feel the sweat bead up on my forehead and nausea churn up in my gut.
I've since read online that some guys go into the doctor's office for a vasectomy and choose to listen to music while the procedure is going on. Looking back, I wish I had chosen this option also. As it was all I got to hear was clamping, snipping and my own slow rhythmic exhaling while I was trying to keep myself from passing out.
Other guys report being in a room with a mirror on the ceiling so they can watch the whole show while it's going on. Kinda like getting to star in your own personal episode of Nip/Tuck, I guess. I can think of little else that I would want to see less than a doctor poking around at my genitals with mom's good scissors. Though maybe this would have expedited the passing out process which would have been just fine with me.
I did express to the good doctor that I felt like I might pass out. He told me to keep taking deep breaths and that if I were to faint, he would still go on with the operation. Hearing that made me feel better. I told that same thing to an endodontist once and he got all surly with me like I was upsetting his schedule or something. With the urologist, I knew that me losing consciousness wasn't going to upset anyone's apple cart.
As it happens, I did not pass out mainly because there wasn't enough time to. The upside of being a uniballer is that a vasectomy only takes half the time that it does for most men. The ballwasher lady had told me that because the doctor was very good at what he does the whole procedure would take less than twenty minutes, but during my previous consultation a week before the doctor had told me that indeed mine would be about ten. I have to admit though that although it seemed like a lifetime while the whole thing was going on, I think from start to finish the time it took to complete the procedure was really more like four or maybe five minutes.
My urologist used the no scalpel procedure that everyone raves about. I've also heard people refer to this method as the Chinese method because it's apparently been standard operating procedure in China now for the past 25 years. A few things come to mind here though.
I am hesitant to refer to any method as Chinese for a couple reasons. First of all it sounds like one of those things we say is Chinese not because it is but because somehow associating it with the Chinese makes it seem more exotic and therefore more marketable. Also for whatever reason the Chinese have often been victims of racial nomenclatures they had nothing to do with like the Chinese fire drill or Chinese red lights.
Mr. Lee, how do you get your shirts so clean? Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
When I taught elementary school and a kid wanted to break in line, they would sometimes engage in what they referred to as Chinese cuts. This was a setup where if one person wouldn't let you cut in line, you asked the person in front of him for Chinese cuts. If he agreed, he would let you cut in front of him with the understanding that he would then cut back in front of you, thus earning you the place in line you had originally hoped for. More often this technique was used not so much to score a place in line as it was just to piss off the person who originally told you no but that you still ended up standing in front of.
Aside from that, it's just silly to refer to any form of birth control as the Chinese method. We're talking about a country that accounts for less than two percent of the world's land mass and yet twenty percent of the world's population. Do the math, people. Saying a particular form of contraception is Chinese in my opinion doesn't really lend to its credibility.
Anyway, enough of that. I'm tired of googling land mass and population statistics. I'll have you know I even opened up an Excel spreadsheet to come up with my percentages. This is because I care so much about you the reader that I want to provide you with accurate information. And also because I suffer from Need-to-Know-Worthless-Information Disorder. OK, back to the operating table.
Instead of cutting into my scrotum with a knife to get to the nutmeats the doctor apparently used a pair of specially designed really really sharp forceps. You can see a picture of the instrument by doing an image search online. I don't know that the thing looks any less scary than a scalpel does. You go home with stitches either way.
After getting dressed I went to the checkout desk to collect my prescriptions and obligatory sterile cup. I pulled the cup out of the bag and asked the receptionist if I could bring the specimen in from home or would it have to be collected on site. My doctor, who was passing by on his way out of the office at the time, patted me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry. We're not gonna make you do that here." Then the receptionist added that if I wanted I could have my wife do it.
Yeh, right.
Somehow I don't think this falls into the category of for better or for worse. Turning down the bed so I can go home and recoup I knew I could count on my wife for. She's a nurturer and all, but as far as collecting my bodily fluids in a cup, I think I'm gonna have to be on my own.
I drove immediately to the pharmacy to get my prescriptions filled. I tried not to walk funny but with every step it just felt like I had a ten-pound weight hanging from my scrotum. The athletic supporter I was wearing wasn't very supportive either except that the waistband in it was so tight it felt like it was cutting off my circulation. Upon taking it off later that day I'd realize it was a medium which is not the ideal size for a guy who sometimes has to rely on the Fatty McFat expando waistband so he can still squeeze into a 36" waist.
The pain I felt after that was really annoying. Not excruciating. Just annoying. It felt like I needed to make an adjustment only there was really no adjustment I could make that made things better. I tried both crossing and uncrossing my legs when I sat down. I tried the lift. The fidget. No matter how many rounds of pocket pool I played, I just couldn't seem to win. Furthermore I dreaded sneezing, coughing, laughing, shouting, walking, driving over speed bumps or even around sharp corners.
The weird thing was that my right testicle felt like it had sympathy pains for the left and the right one's not even real. It sounds like I'm kidding but I'm not. I noticed this same phantom sensation for the first few days after my original right testicle (the cancerous one to which I was biologically related as opposed to the saline-filled stepchild that's in there now) had been removed. They say people who have an extremity or a limb amputated go through the same thing. It's most unsettling to ache in a part of your body that doesn't exist anymore. Though, come to think of it you have to admit there is some resemblance here.
I also had this queasy feeling that I couldn't seem to shake for the rest of the day. I don't know if it was from the physical discomfort or just because I couldn't stop thinking about the procedure I had undergone. Maybe it's just psychosomatic, but for the whole day and into the next one I just felt like I could have thrown up at any moment. Thankfully I found that pain meds and booze helped alleviate the symptoms or at least render me happy to the point that I didn't care about them anymore.
I had the operation done on Friday at the direction of my doctor so that I could recoup over the weekend and return to work on Monday. I do have to teach that evening, but I'm giving a test and aside from that I'll probably do a lot of sitting at the desk and having students go to the board. Ahh, the joys of student-focused learning!
Vasectomy was a choice my wife and I made after having discussed it ever since our toddler was born. It just seemed like the most cost-effective and relatively easy form of permanent birth control. We are a family of three and my wife and I decided early on in the threesome that we both liked it that way. I also didn't feel comfortable asking my wife to undergo tubal strangulation when that's a much more invasive, expensive and uncomfortable procedure.
I got the vasectomy done three days ago. Sorry I didn't blog about it immediately but I just kinda thought my parents should find out from me directly as opposed to reading it in my blog. After all, I was carrying their genetic code too. I'm not 100% recovered yet, but I feel pretty good and I'm happy with the decision I made. If you're in the Atlanta area and want a referral to a great urologist, shoot me an email to cocktailswithkevin at hotmail dawt com and I'll hook you up.
That's basically it. Not much more to it. This is the exciting conclusion to what has been a very special episode of cocktailswithkevin.com I'll be back to my regularly scheduled mindless banter tomorrow. In the meantime thanks for having placated my ego by reading through all this explicit detail. I promise when it comes time to return the cup, I'll keep that business to myself.
No, there are no graphic pictures forthcoming, so there'll be nothing that will require any library staff member to employ the shoulder tap. It's just that I'm likely to forgo clinical terms and instead employ such slanguistic gems as balls, nutsack, and peepee used as a noun. As far as the vas deferens is concerned I'll probably just refer to it by its proper name, as I can think of no four-letter substitute.
Also seeing as how this post will be mainly about my down there and, depending upon how well you know me, you may not want to hear anymore about my down there than you likely already have, this may be an ideal time to go check email instead. If you do not know me well enough to know the history of my nether regions and are feeling left out, you can learn more about it by clicking hither or yon. Enjoy.
Alright. Are those kiddies gone now? Good. Oh, wait. That one kid's still peeking around the corner. Also, if you're at work, make sure you don't read words like balls and nutsack out loud.
Speaking of out loud, in the waiting room at the urologist's office I sat next to one of those people who likes to take advantage of the lengthy wait time by sharing her medical history with anyone who would listen, me included. To her credit she was also quick to talk about what a good doctor the urologist was. I don't mean to be judgmental, but I'm just gonna say it. This woman was what we like to call Ivory Recycling.
When her immediate audience stopped feigning interest she dialed up someone on her cell phone and spoke volume ten to him about it. Annoyingly enough, the call recipient also spoke volume ten so everyone in the waiting room could hear him express the sympathies this woman was clearly seeking. As far as I'm concerned the less I know about someone else's kidney stones the better. I felt like saying Get a blog, lady. But I didn't because that would have been rude, and y'all know I'm not like that.
I had been instructed to bring an athletic supporter as well as the consent form bearing signatures of both me and my wife which I did. The consent form started out with I [write your name] being of -- and then there was a blank line. I asked the receptionist if I was supposed to have written something here such as "questionable moral character" or "low social standing", but she informed me that instead "sound mind and body" would do. So I wrote them words on that paper and handed it to her.
As I was thumbing through outdated magazines trying to pass the time I noticed a patient emerging from the exam rooms making his way to the checkout desk where he was then provided two prescriptions and a plastic cup in which to bring back a specimen in six to eight weeks. Having previously been childless and needing to undergo chemotherapy, I also was familiar with the plastic cup, so I already knew what he would eventually discover, namely that making love to it is about as fun as it sounds. Oh well. By the stunned look on this guy's face, ejaculation was probably the last thing on his mind.
When this guy walked back out into the waiting room I could see that he was wearing sweatpants. My wife made me pack some too, but I left them out in the car. If you're going to be impotent, you ought to look impotent. Get it?
A nurse finally escorted me back to an exam room and instructed me to undress from the waist down, climb up on the table and cover my nakedness with what was essentially a Kleenex the size of a throw rug. This was more than sixty anxiety-riddled minutes after my scheduled appointment time and easily another ten minutes before I would finally see the doctor. I just rested on the exam table alternating between sitting up and lying back. Two large gooseneck lamps shown down on my paper-draped peepee.
Hey, I warned you I was gonna say peepee.
The nurse eventually came back in, put on gloves and announced that she was now going to see, as she put it, how well I shaved. With that she lifted up the paper tarp and rearranged me so she coud fully inspect the surgical area. I couldn't help but chuckle at her phraseology.
"I think I nicked myself. Is that points off?" I asked.
She said that normally it would be but since my scrotum was free of blood I was still okay. Then she disappeared for a while before coming back in announcing that her next task was to clean my scrotum. Note here I'm using clinical terminology only because that's what she said. At the doctor's they say scrotum. They don't say nutsack and stuff like that.
Again she rearranged my man parts and scrubbed down my business with baby wipes. This time she put on latex gloves which is fine with me. I'm not really into latex gloves but whatever. Besides while I'm sure she gave the guy with the cup a good washing too, I do feel more comfortable knowing she changed gloves in between so I don't get his cooties. Before she left this time she got another paper throw rug and tied two of its corners to the gooseneck lamps to act as a screen.
Finally the doctor entered the room and greeted me. I have a good rapport with my urologist because I've seen him several times over the past few years. After Meryl was born, I visited his office just to show her off to him. On my most recent consultation with him he gave me a hug. Not this time though. We were separated from each other by a makeshift privacy screen and I was pantless to boot.
There was some polite small talk and he asked me if we were really gonna do this. I said we were and so the agreement was made.
Much like at the dentist office when the dentist is drilling directly into your nerve endings and he tries to fake some pointless conversation with the false hopes of taking your mind off the procedure, so did my urologist attempt to fake me out by asking about my wife and kid. I was polite and responded but quickly tried to change the subject to the woman in the waiting room who was singing his praises. More specifically I just wanted him to know that people out front were talking favorably about him. I guess deep down I had hoped this would somehow encourage him to make the procedure more pleasurable.
Fat chance.
He continued the banter and promptly grabbed my one remaining testicle so he could fidget around with it and find the vas deferens. Now up until this point my down there medical repertoire included having my nuts jostled, my epididymis squeezed and even a testicle outright removed and never before had I experienced as much discomfort as when this guy was rooting around in my nutsack trying to find the spermadic chord.
I don't know that there's much he could have done to make it more pleasant either. I think regardless of how skilled the physician is, if someone's fishing for such a sensitive part of your reproductive system through your scrotum aka nutsack it just hurts like a sonofabitch. Come to think of it it was kinda like the sharp pain a guy gets from landing wrong on a bicycle seat after having jumped the Grand Canyon. Just not good.
Then came the injection. At least I think that's what came next. You see while I tried to keep up the pretense of discernible conversation with this man, things from this point on just started to blur. I never lost consciousness or anything (try as I might have). It's just that one loses all concern for polite protocol and social graces when his man parts are being knocked about, especially when the person doing the knocking isn't some highly paid woman in black latex saying bad boy bad boy. I've just heard. I don't know from experience or anything.
But really, I remember the doctor saying I would feel a pinch and a burn, the pinch being from the needle going in and the burn being from the medicine entering the site of the injection. While this wasn't nearly as painful as the previous game of Here-We-Go-Round-My-Gonad, it was at this point that I started to feel the sweat bead up on my forehead and nausea churn up in my gut.
I've since read online that some guys go into the doctor's office for a vasectomy and choose to listen to music while the procedure is going on. Looking back, I wish I had chosen this option also. As it was all I got to hear was clamping, snipping and my own slow rhythmic exhaling while I was trying to keep myself from passing out.
Other guys report being in a room with a mirror on the ceiling so they can watch the whole show while it's going on. Kinda like getting to star in your own personal episode of Nip/Tuck, I guess. I can think of little else that I would want to see less than a doctor poking around at my genitals with mom's good scissors. Though maybe this would have expedited the passing out process which would have been just fine with me.
I did express to the good doctor that I felt like I might pass out. He told me to keep taking deep breaths and that if I were to faint, he would still go on with the operation. Hearing that made me feel better. I told that same thing to an endodontist once and he got all surly with me like I was upsetting his schedule or something. With the urologist, I knew that me losing consciousness wasn't going to upset anyone's apple cart.
As it happens, I did not pass out mainly because there wasn't enough time to. The upside of being a uniballer is that a vasectomy only takes half the time that it does for most men. The ballwasher lady had told me that because the doctor was very good at what he does the whole procedure would take less than twenty minutes, but during my previous consultation a week before the doctor had told me that indeed mine would be about ten. I have to admit though that although it seemed like a lifetime while the whole thing was going on, I think from start to finish the time it took to complete the procedure was really more like four or maybe five minutes.
My urologist used the no scalpel procedure that everyone raves about. I've also heard people refer to this method as the Chinese method because it's apparently been standard operating procedure in China now for the past 25 years. A few things come to mind here though.
I am hesitant to refer to any method as Chinese for a couple reasons. First of all it sounds like one of those things we say is Chinese not because it is but because somehow associating it with the Chinese makes it seem more exotic and therefore more marketable. Also for whatever reason the Chinese have often been victims of racial nomenclatures they had nothing to do with like the Chinese fire drill or Chinese red lights.
Mr. Lee, how do you get your shirts so clean? Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
When I taught elementary school and a kid wanted to break in line, they would sometimes engage in what they referred to as Chinese cuts. This was a setup where if one person wouldn't let you cut in line, you asked the person in front of him for Chinese cuts. If he agreed, he would let you cut in front of him with the understanding that he would then cut back in front of you, thus earning you the place in line you had originally hoped for. More often this technique was used not so much to score a place in line as it was just to piss off the person who originally told you no but that you still ended up standing in front of.
Aside from that, it's just silly to refer to any form of birth control as the Chinese method. We're talking about a country that accounts for less than two percent of the world's land mass and yet twenty percent of the world's population. Do the math, people. Saying a particular form of contraception is Chinese in my opinion doesn't really lend to its credibility.
Anyway, enough of that. I'm tired of googling land mass and population statistics. I'll have you know I even opened up an Excel spreadsheet to come up with my percentages. This is because I care so much about you the reader that I want to provide you with accurate information. And also because I suffer from Need-to-Know-Worthless-Information Disorder. OK, back to the operating table.
Instead of cutting into my scrotum with a knife to get to the nutmeats the doctor apparently used a pair of specially designed really really sharp forceps. You can see a picture of the instrument by doing an image search online. I don't know that the thing looks any less scary than a scalpel does. You go home with stitches either way.
After getting dressed I went to the checkout desk to collect my prescriptions and obligatory sterile cup. I pulled the cup out of the bag and asked the receptionist if I could bring the specimen in from home or would it have to be collected on site. My doctor, who was passing by on his way out of the office at the time, patted me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry. We're not gonna make you do that here." Then the receptionist added that if I wanted I could have my wife do it.
Yeh, right.
Somehow I don't think this falls into the category of for better or for worse. Turning down the bed so I can go home and recoup I knew I could count on my wife for. She's a nurturer and all, but as far as collecting my bodily fluids in a cup, I think I'm gonna have to be on my own.
I drove immediately to the pharmacy to get my prescriptions filled. I tried not to walk funny but with every step it just felt like I had a ten-pound weight hanging from my scrotum. The athletic supporter I was wearing wasn't very supportive either except that the waistband in it was so tight it felt like it was cutting off my circulation. Upon taking it off later that day I'd realize it was a medium which is not the ideal size for a guy who sometimes has to rely on the Fatty McFat expando waistband so he can still squeeze into a 36" waist.
The pain I felt after that was really annoying. Not excruciating. Just annoying. It felt like I needed to make an adjustment only there was really no adjustment I could make that made things better. I tried both crossing and uncrossing my legs when I sat down. I tried the lift. The fidget. No matter how many rounds of pocket pool I played, I just couldn't seem to win. Furthermore I dreaded sneezing, coughing, laughing, shouting, walking, driving over speed bumps or even around sharp corners.
The weird thing was that my right testicle felt like it had sympathy pains for the left and the right one's not even real. It sounds like I'm kidding but I'm not. I noticed this same phantom sensation for the first few days after my original right testicle (the cancerous one to which I was biologically related as opposed to the saline-filled stepchild that's in there now) had been removed. They say people who have an extremity or a limb amputated go through the same thing. It's most unsettling to ache in a part of your body that doesn't exist anymore. Though, come to think of it you have to admit there is some resemblance here.
I also had this queasy feeling that I couldn't seem to shake for the rest of the day. I don't know if it was from the physical discomfort or just because I couldn't stop thinking about the procedure I had undergone. Maybe it's just psychosomatic, but for the whole day and into the next one I just felt like I could have thrown up at any moment. Thankfully I found that pain meds and booze helped alleviate the symptoms or at least render me happy to the point that I didn't care about them anymore.
I had the operation done on Friday at the direction of my doctor so that I could recoup over the weekend and return to work on Monday. I do have to teach that evening, but I'm giving a test and aside from that I'll probably do a lot of sitting at the desk and having students go to the board. Ahh, the joys of student-focused learning!
Vasectomy was a choice my wife and I made after having discussed it ever since our toddler was born. It just seemed like the most cost-effective and relatively easy form of permanent birth control. We are a family of three and my wife and I decided early on in the threesome that we both liked it that way. I also didn't feel comfortable asking my wife to undergo tubal strangulation when that's a much more invasive, expensive and uncomfortable procedure.
I got the vasectomy done three days ago. Sorry I didn't blog about it immediately but I just kinda thought my parents should find out from me directly as opposed to reading it in my blog. After all, I was carrying their genetic code too. I'm not 100% recovered yet, but I feel pretty good and I'm happy with the decision I made. If you're in the Atlanta area and want a referral to a great urologist, shoot me an email to cocktailswithkevin at hotmail dawt com and I'll hook you up.
That's basically it. Not much more to it. This is the exciting conclusion to what has been a very special episode of cocktailswithkevin.com I'll be back to my regularly scheduled mindless banter tomorrow. In the meantime thanks for having placated my ego by reading through all this explicit detail. I promise when it comes time to return the cup, I'll keep that business to myself.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Are you ready for your mystery date?
Eons ago my wife and I instituted the concept of the mystery date into our courtship. No, not some 1960s Milton Bradley board game with a catchy jingle on the commercial. I mean once a month one of us would plan an outing and surprise the other with the date.
There really are no guidelines. A mystery date could be anything from dinner and a movie to tickets to some event or even champagne and a fireplace if it's done up right. Mystery dates seem to have fallen out of fashion though somewhere around pregnancy and childrearing, but we resolved to make 2008 the year we reintroduce them into the relationship.
In January I decided I should ease back into mystery dating somewhat frugally. Not only does it not make sense to spend money you don't have, but I also didn't want to start off with too big of a bang only to let the art of mystery dating fizzle because I did too much too soon. So I picked a movie that I knew Elaine would like, divvied up a four-pack of single-serve wine bottles into my jacket pockets and headed for the movie theater with my one and only.
We went to go see 27 Dresses. Apparently I did a decent job picking the movie because Elaine loved every sappy minute of it. I thought it to be kitschy at best and . . . well . . . cheesy at worst, but the wine made the blasé acting and storyline a little more tolerable. Better yet, we were able to purchase the movie tickets without having to first take out an equity line on our home.
Barely.
Anyway, this month it's Elaine's turn and she chose Valentine's Day to mark our second monthly mystery date of the year. I have no idea what's in store for the evening, but really being surprised is half the fun. On the other hand, for the person doing the planning, it's the secret machinations that are the most fun. So far all I know is that my parents are coming over this evening to babysit.
That reminds me. I need to lock the liquor cabinet.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
My recent escape from Paris
On my most recent trip to Paris I stayed at the Hôtel du Mont Blanc in the Latin Quarter on rue de la Huchette. My wife found it years ago when we were visiting the city with friends, and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a quaint yet affordable place to stay in Paris. It's in a pedestrian district around the corner from the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, the smallest street in the city. Notre Dame is within walking distance and the neighborhood is a direct ride on the Métro from Charles de Gaulle airport.
I sprung from the bed that morning at 6:30 sharp thanks to a wake-up call I had asked the front desk clerk to set up for me less than six hours prior, and I quickly gathered my things after having shat, showered and shaved. OK, I hadn't really showered or shaved. Sorry, but no one wants to have to make an extended potty visit during an overseas flight.
Trust me. I've been there. You can't go back to the drink cart which for some reason is always inches away from the bathrooms without everyone staring at you with that look that says You're that guy in 23B who had the audacity to take a crizzap while the rest of us were bumping elbows trying to enjoy our partially hydrogenated Salisbury steak. Take my advice. Go before you fly.
When the hotel clerk wasn't to be found at the front desk I walked downstairs and found him on the lower level in the breakfast room where he was enjoying a baguette and jam with coffee. Upon seeing me he smiled and followed me back up the stairs to the front desk so I could settle my bill.
This was slightly awkward for me because I knew I didn't have enough money to pay for both my room and the phone call I had made the night before to Air France confirming my flight. I barely had enough cash to cover the room. I didn't have any credit cards either. I did have a debit card that was tied to our checking account which had a dollar amount I estimated to be somewhere in the high single digits.
Normally I would feel bad about this but I was still miffed from the night before when I asked the clerk how much a ten-minute phone call would be and he couldn't give me a direct answer. The call ended up being north of 20 euro (that's just over $30 to us impoverished Yanks) so I felt like the hotel was taking me to the cleaners already. Even still, I was clearly going to have to muster up some persuasive French if I wanted to leave the hotel without Inspector Javert as an escort.
The clerk gave me the total and, sure enough, I was short about 18 euro. Now in all honesty I had some cash still in my wallet but I knew I was going to need some airport monies to secure the last-minute travel essentials, namely two bottles of Coca Light and maybe a magazine, so I wasn't going to part with that very readily. Instead I explained to him that I would have to charge the remainder of my balance to the credit card that was used to book my room originally, a credit card that I did not have on my person mind you because I had left it with my wife in the Rome airport.
In the few minutes that followed he and I had an exchange of words that were typical of what two French natives might have shared under similar circumstances. You see, when and American argues with one of his fellow countrymen, he typically thinks himself to be in the right and hopes to convince his opponent of such. On the other hand, when French people argue they typically do so simply for the sake of arguing. They don't go for the win so much as they go for the thrill of debate. I played the game.
His position was that the hotel would spend so much money in fees to my credit card company that it would almost be pointless to charge it on a card. I proposed then that he let me keep my cash and then charge the entire amount to the card, thus minimizing the percentage of fees the hotel would endure. Truth be told, the hotel just didn't like accepting credit cards in the first place and our reservation confirmation even stated that they had a strong preference for cash. I'm not certain of the agreement merchants have with credit card companies but I think that if they require a credit card for booking a room (and this place did) they then obligate themselves to accept a credit card for final payment. I don't know for sure. I'm just guessing.
Anyway, I convinced him that he was holding all the cash I had. He already knew of my penniless plight because I had explained everything to him and asked for his assistance the day before in getting the phone number for Air France, googling information about the airline strike and finding out where in the neighborhood I could take my laptop to freeload someone's wireless connection (in French it's pronounced wee-fee.) This guy was far and away more accommodating than most Parisians would have been in his position, so I really couldn't complain. On the contrary, I appreciated his understanding and his willingness to converse with a non-native in what must have sounded to him like jet-lagged-half-awake-foreigner-at-the-buttcrack-of-dawn broken French. I plead my case, and he relented.
Métro St-Michel was a short walk from the hotel, and I had already purchased the subway ticket I'd need to get back to the airport. The only problem was that for whatever reason my ticket wouldn't clear the turnstile in order to let me in the station. I looked at the markings on it to make sure it hadn't already been used. I tried inserting it several different ways into the machine but every time the turnstile just buzzed and shot the ticket back out at me.
Another early-morning Métro rider saw me fiddling with the ticket and came to my rescue. Giving a quick glance around the station to make sure no one was watching, he then pushed the handicap gate open so I could pass through without validating my ticket. To this day I'm not sure why I couldn't get the ticket to work. I had paid the full amount for a fare from inside the city all the way to the airport and that ticket hadn't been used, but whatever, this guy gave me the courage to do what I wouldn't have had the courage to do otherwise. Hey, I like breaking the rules just as much as the next guy.
For the entire twenty-five-minute subway ride I held on to my unvalidated ticket trying to make it look like I was just another law-abiding passenger when in fact I was a ne'er-do-well law breaker who had already weaseled his way out of a hotel bill like some unscrupulous gypsy. Of the many times I had ridden the Paris Métro, I had never until then gone illegally. As guidebooks would have you believe, when you're caught without a valid ticket, you either pay a hefty fine on the spot or get carried off to jail. I've seen Les Miz enough times to know I'm not cut out for that French chain gang shit.
As my luck would have it I freeloaded successfully all the way to the station at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Almost.
Just as I was about to enter the airport I looked ahead and noticed people inserting their subway tickets into the turnstiles before leaving the station. I had forgotten that while you need only validate a ticket once when traveling inside the city, if you ride the RER in order to get to farther destinations like the airport or -- God forbid -- Euro Disney you have to validate the ticket upon both entering and leaving the subway to make sure you've paid the full fare for the trip.
Shit.
I knew that as soon as I stuck my bootleg ticket in that machine it was going to announce to everyone around that I was cheating the French out of five euro and because at that point I had spent my last bit of cash in the station on Diet Cokes I really didn't have any money left with which to pay a fine. Keeping calm I quickly tried to pre-plan the French vocabulary I'd need to talk my way out of this one.
I should say at this point that while my French isn't bad, there are certain linguistic feats that require a very high level of language ability on the part of the speaker in order to succeed and lying is one of them. I pictured myself trying to play the dumb American who didn't know any better to the gendarmes and in the meantime missing my flight home. Oddly enough fate threw me another bone and I dove for it.
Of the many turnstiles at Charles de Gaulle Métro station there was one that was in the midst of being serviced by a transit worker. It wasn't out of order. Other people were going through it. It's just that evidently a ticket would occasionally get caught up in the mechanism and be rejected so the worker would have to manually let the passenger through the gate. Seeing this as a potential solution for my dilemma, I walked up, casually inserted my virgin ticket into the machine, and it spat the ticket back out at me with a loud buzz.
I pulled it out of the slot and gave the transit worker a puzzled look. Taking the ticket from my hand and flipping it over, he tried reinserting it back in the turnstile. No surprise. The machine spat it back out and buzzed again.
I thought for certain at this point the guy would have looked at the ticket and noticed that it hadn't been validated at the point of origin but he did not. Instead he just gave that Gallic shrug that Frenchmen do when something doesn't go as planned. Then he simply opened the gate with his key and motioned for me to pass through. I thanked him and headed promptly for the Air France ticketing desk without looking back.
I got the pat down a total of three times before they let me on the plane that day, probably because French Intelligence was on to my game. Suits me just fine. They did finally let me on and I made it back to Atlanta with no further difficulties. It's a good thing too. Otherwise I would have had to resort to being one of those homeless people that lives in the Paris Metro.
If you think airplane bathrooms smell bad, you should get a whiff of the Pigalle station.
I sprung from the bed that morning at 6:30 sharp thanks to a wake-up call I had asked the front desk clerk to set up for me less than six hours prior, and I quickly gathered my things after having shat, showered and shaved. OK, I hadn't really showered or shaved. Sorry, but no one wants to have to make an extended potty visit during an overseas flight.
Trust me. I've been there. You can't go back to the drink cart which for some reason is always inches away from the bathrooms without everyone staring at you with that look that says You're that guy in 23B who had the audacity to take a crizzap while the rest of us were bumping elbows trying to enjoy our partially hydrogenated Salisbury steak. Take my advice. Go before you fly.
When the hotel clerk wasn't to be found at the front desk I walked downstairs and found him on the lower level in the breakfast room where he was enjoying a baguette and jam with coffee. Upon seeing me he smiled and followed me back up the stairs to the front desk so I could settle my bill.
This was slightly awkward for me because I knew I didn't have enough money to pay for both my room and the phone call I had made the night before to Air France confirming my flight. I barely had enough cash to cover the room. I didn't have any credit cards either. I did have a debit card that was tied to our checking account which had a dollar amount I estimated to be somewhere in the high single digits.
Normally I would feel bad about this but I was still miffed from the night before when I asked the clerk how much a ten-minute phone call would be and he couldn't give me a direct answer. The call ended up being north of 20 euro (that's just over $30 to us impoverished Yanks) so I felt like the hotel was taking me to the cleaners already. Even still, I was clearly going to have to muster up some persuasive French if I wanted to leave the hotel without Inspector Javert as an escort.
The clerk gave me the total and, sure enough, I was short about 18 euro. Now in all honesty I had some cash still in my wallet but I knew I was going to need some airport monies to secure the last-minute travel essentials, namely two bottles of Coca Light and maybe a magazine, so I wasn't going to part with that very readily. Instead I explained to him that I would have to charge the remainder of my balance to the credit card that was used to book my room originally, a credit card that I did not have on my person mind you because I had left it with my wife in the Rome airport.
In the few minutes that followed he and I had an exchange of words that were typical of what two French natives might have shared under similar circumstances. You see, when and American argues with one of his fellow countrymen, he typically thinks himself to be in the right and hopes to convince his opponent of such. On the other hand, when French people argue they typically do so simply for the sake of arguing. They don't go for the win so much as they go for the thrill of debate. I played the game.
His position was that the hotel would spend so much money in fees to my credit card company that it would almost be pointless to charge it on a card. I proposed then that he let me keep my cash and then charge the entire amount to the card, thus minimizing the percentage of fees the hotel would endure. Truth be told, the hotel just didn't like accepting credit cards in the first place and our reservation confirmation even stated that they had a strong preference for cash. I'm not certain of the agreement merchants have with credit card companies but I think that if they require a credit card for booking a room (and this place did) they then obligate themselves to accept a credit card for final payment. I don't know for sure. I'm just guessing.
Anyway, I convinced him that he was holding all the cash I had. He already knew of my penniless plight because I had explained everything to him and asked for his assistance the day before in getting the phone number for Air France, googling information about the airline strike and finding out where in the neighborhood I could take my laptop to freeload someone's wireless connection (in French it's pronounced wee-fee.) This guy was far and away more accommodating than most Parisians would have been in his position, so I really couldn't complain. On the contrary, I appreciated his understanding and his willingness to converse with a non-native in what must have sounded to him like jet-lagged-half-awake-foreigner-at-the-buttcrack-of-dawn broken French. I plead my case, and he relented.
Métro St-Michel was a short walk from the hotel, and I had already purchased the subway ticket I'd need to get back to the airport. The only problem was that for whatever reason my ticket wouldn't clear the turnstile in order to let me in the station. I looked at the markings on it to make sure it hadn't already been used. I tried inserting it several different ways into the machine but every time the turnstile just buzzed and shot the ticket back out at me.
Another early-morning Métro rider saw me fiddling with the ticket and came to my rescue. Giving a quick glance around the station to make sure no one was watching, he then pushed the handicap gate open so I could pass through without validating my ticket. To this day I'm not sure why I couldn't get the ticket to work. I had paid the full amount for a fare from inside the city all the way to the airport and that ticket hadn't been used, but whatever, this guy gave me the courage to do what I wouldn't have had the courage to do otherwise. Hey, I like breaking the rules just as much as the next guy.
For the entire twenty-five-minute subway ride I held on to my unvalidated ticket trying to make it look like I was just another law-abiding passenger when in fact I was a ne'er-do-well law breaker who had already weaseled his way out of a hotel bill like some unscrupulous gypsy. Of the many times I had ridden the Paris Métro, I had never until then gone illegally. As guidebooks would have you believe, when you're caught without a valid ticket, you either pay a hefty fine on the spot or get carried off to jail. I've seen Les Miz enough times to know I'm not cut out for that French chain gang shit.
As my luck would have it I freeloaded successfully all the way to the station at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Almost.
Just as I was about to enter the airport I looked ahead and noticed people inserting their subway tickets into the turnstiles before leaving the station. I had forgotten that while you need only validate a ticket once when traveling inside the city, if you ride the RER in order to get to farther destinations like the airport or -- God forbid -- Euro Disney you have to validate the ticket upon both entering and leaving the subway to make sure you've paid the full fare for the trip.
Shit.
I knew that as soon as I stuck my bootleg ticket in that machine it was going to announce to everyone around that I was cheating the French out of five euro and because at that point I had spent my last bit of cash in the station on Diet Cokes I really didn't have any money left with which to pay a fine. Keeping calm I quickly tried to pre-plan the French vocabulary I'd need to talk my way out of this one.
I should say at this point that while my French isn't bad, there are certain linguistic feats that require a very high level of language ability on the part of the speaker in order to succeed and lying is one of them. I pictured myself trying to play the dumb American who didn't know any better to the gendarmes and in the meantime missing my flight home. Oddly enough fate threw me another bone and I dove for it.
Of the many turnstiles at Charles de Gaulle Métro station there was one that was in the midst of being serviced by a transit worker. It wasn't out of order. Other people were going through it. It's just that evidently a ticket would occasionally get caught up in the mechanism and be rejected so the worker would have to manually let the passenger through the gate. Seeing this as a potential solution for my dilemma, I walked up, casually inserted my virgin ticket into the machine, and it spat the ticket back out at me with a loud buzz.
I pulled it out of the slot and gave the transit worker a puzzled look. Taking the ticket from my hand and flipping it over, he tried reinserting it back in the turnstile. No surprise. The machine spat it back out and buzzed again.
I thought for certain at this point the guy would have looked at the ticket and noticed that it hadn't been validated at the point of origin but he did not. Instead he just gave that Gallic shrug that Frenchmen do when something doesn't go as planned. Then he simply opened the gate with his key and motioned for me to pass through. I thanked him and headed promptly for the Air France ticketing desk without looking back.
I got the pat down a total of three times before they let me on the plane that day, probably because French Intelligence was on to my game. Suits me just fine. They did finally let me on and I made it back to Atlanta with no further difficulties. It's a good thing too. Otherwise I would have had to resort to being one of those homeless people that lives in the Paris Metro.
If you think airplane bathrooms smell bad, you should get a whiff of the Pigalle station.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Ascencia bank frustrates and disappoints faithful consumer
Because some drug-happy criminal got a hold of my debit card number and used it to purchase pharmaceuticals from an online Filipino pusher I have been on and off the phone with Ascencia Bank for over a month. While I give Ascencia kudos for finally crediting back my money and untangling what could have easily elevated into a financial mess for me, I was quite disappointed with their bumbling when it came to doing something so presumably simple as getting me a debit card replacement.
Ascencia is strictly an online bank based out of Louisville, KY. We do all our banking with them over the innerwebs, and my wife and I monitor our accounts almost daily. When we noticed two transactions from Mercury Drug totaling around $50 we got suspicious and called the number on the back of the card to report fraudulent activity.
I honestly don't know who that number belongs to. I'm guessing it's some clearinghouse for debit cards issued from various banks. Anyway, I know it's not Ascencia Bank because the guy on the other end of the phone, who sounded like he was all of fourteen years old, had no clue how to spell Ascencia. Even after I spelled it for him. Twice. Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't know how to spell bank, but anyway I digress.
We didn't know which card, hers or mine, had been compromised, so we canceled them both. Unfortunately it was on Friday evening that we caught the transaction, so we had to wait until the following Monday to contact our bank. The service rep was kind enough to hear my tale of woe, inform me as to what should happen and then order replacement debit cards for both me and my wife.
So I thought.
As anyone with an ATM or a debit card is aware, before you get a new card in the mail, you first get correspondence from the bank telling you that the card is on its way and what the PIN will be when you get it. Well, we waited a week and no such correspondence ever came. No cards. No PINS. No nothing.
I called Ascencia and was told to wait a few more days, and we did. In the meantime we were asked to sign affidavits affirming that we were not the ones who had made the purchases. Incidentally I have no way of knowing what drugs the thief ordered but I hope for his own sake he got something good like Oxycontin or Valium and not just some antidepressant or fatty fatty Phentermine.
Still nothing from the bank so we called back. Again. This time I was placed on hold while the service rep called the third-party company that makes and distributes the debit cards to all the happy boys and girls. When the rep came back on the line she explained that for whatever reason no cards had originally been ordered to be mailed out, but she was going to order them now to be overnighted to us so that we would have them in due course. Well, sure enough, a couple of overnights later, the cards arrived via DHL.
But alas, the cards did not work. I tried a number of times to activate them through an ATM and also at the grocery store register where I'd have to key in my PIN. Each time I was told by the ATM that my transaction could not be processed, and my favorite crotchety checkout lady at Kroger just looked at me like I was some deadbeat dad with no money and a soiled credit record. This is the same lady that scolds me for not buckling my kid into the grocery cart seat or for not bundling her up well enough to protect her from the elements, but anyway I digress further.
Sorry, this whole thing just has me worked up.
When I called Ascencia back to tell them my further misfortune, they informed me that while my cards were overnighted to me, my PINs would not arrive for another week or so. Dearest Ascencia Bank, what EFFING good does it do me to receive cards in the mail I cannot use? What do you think I would do with a non-functioning debit card? Sleep with it like some attachment object the same way a kid goes to bed with a favorite teddy bear? Well, I don't. My Amex maybe, but not by bootleg debit card.
After several more days of waiting and making do with nothing but our 12.9% credit and good looks for payment, the PINs finally arrived. Hooray for PINs! Like a kid in a candy store with a blank check, I hurried off to the nearest ATM to activate the card with the newly arrived personal identification number.
No dice.
Apparently my multiple attempts at having previously tried to activate the card with the wrong PIN put a red flag on the card so that now when I tried to activate it with the correct PIN it was too late. I don't know what about this frustrated me more, that I still did not have a working debit card or that I was going to have to once again call my bank. With gritted teeth, I got Ascencia on the horn. The conversation went something like this:
"Hi, my name's Kevin and I just received the PINs in the mail for two cards I had already been overnighted, and I think my card is deactivated because I originally used an incorrect PIN."
"I spoke with you before. Remember, I told you you were going to have to wait for the PINs in the mail before you used the card?" the rep said.
Time out.
The phrase I told you is rather accusatory and therefor needs to be reserved for scolding children. Gentle reader, can you ever remember a time that someone said I told you and they weren't in some way admonishing you because you handled a situation differently than how they thought you should have handled it? I thought not. I worked in a call center. The phrase I told you, much like any use of the imperative form, shouldn't be used in any type of customer correspondence.
Secondly IF this customer service rep told me to wait until my personal identification numbers came in the mail (and honestly I don't remember being told that by her or anyone else), she would have had to have said that only AFTER I deactivated the card unknowingly by keying in the wrong PIN and not before. How wrong was it of me to assume that because my bank went to the expense of overnighting cards to me that they should work with the PINs I already had? Otherwise would that same bank have not also overnighted the PINs to me as well? Am I some super genious or should any monkey be able to figure this out?
Thirdly, even IF this customer service rep had warned me to not try and activate the new cards without first having received new corresponding PINs and even IF I ran out to activate them against her advice just to piss off my bank (I didn't, mind you, but I'm just saying for argument's sake) what damn difference does it make? That still wouldn't have changed the fact that I needed this rep's assistance in resetting my PIN. What good would it have done her or me or any of the other customers waiting on hold for her to take the time to shame me by saying I told you so?
And finally -- yes, I have as many as four reasons as to why this rep was amiss in her telephone behavior -- she did not run me through the security questions Ascencia normally requires of me before they dole out personal information about my account over the phone. She did not ask me for my Social Security number. She did not ask me for my mother's maiden name. She didn't ask me for so much as my account number, which by the way is readily available to anyone to whom I've written a check but at LEAST it would have been some form of verification on her part. She just happily went about her way admonishing this wayward caller whose ID she had no way of knowing.
For all she knew I could have been the man in the moon! Even if her phone is equipped with technology that identifies the number I'm calling from as matching the home number they have on file for me, she doesn't know that I'm not some crazy roommate pretending to be someone I'm not with the hopes of gaining someone else's personal financial information. How does she know my wife and I don't rent out a room and thus share a phone line with the Unibomber?
That shit is wrong.
I desperately try not to cop an attitude when I'm on the phone with a customer service rep for reasons I've outlined here. I like to think that when I had Ascencia on the phone that last time I maintained my calm demeanor. I did make a passive attempt to rectify my situation by simply mentioning another service representative in my response to the surly one with the hopes of getting passed on to someone I felt would be more willing to help out, and, by the way, this worked.
Surly Rep promptly kept me on hold while I assume she bitched to Much More Accommodating and Jovial Rep who ended up being more than happy to rectify my situation with little chitchat much less scolding, and she threw in some good ol' fashioned bless your heart. I don't care if when she disconnected the call Accommodating Rep made fun of me and joked with her next-cube neighbor that I was an incompetent dumbass. She was polite when she had me on the phone, and that's all that matters.
I don't know that I plan on firing my bank any time soon. Ascencia does offer some good rates and in all honesty this has been my first negative experience with them. And like I said, they did credit my account with money I never thought I'd see again which I appreciated. I just have little tolerance for those who can't adequately handle what should have been a simple customer request.
Ascencia is strictly an online bank based out of Louisville, KY. We do all our banking with them over the innerwebs, and my wife and I monitor our accounts almost daily. When we noticed two transactions from Mercury Drug totaling around $50 we got suspicious and called the number on the back of the card to report fraudulent activity.
I honestly don't know who that number belongs to. I'm guessing it's some clearinghouse for debit cards issued from various banks. Anyway, I know it's not Ascencia Bank because the guy on the other end of the phone, who sounded like he was all of fourteen years old, had no clue how to spell Ascencia. Even after I spelled it for him. Twice. Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't know how to spell bank, but anyway I digress.
We didn't know which card, hers or mine, had been compromised, so we canceled them both. Unfortunately it was on Friday evening that we caught the transaction, so we had to wait until the following Monday to contact our bank. The service rep was kind enough to hear my tale of woe, inform me as to what should happen and then order replacement debit cards for both me and my wife.
So I thought.
As anyone with an ATM or a debit card is aware, before you get a new card in the mail, you first get correspondence from the bank telling you that the card is on its way and what the PIN will be when you get it. Well, we waited a week and no such correspondence ever came. No cards. No PINS. No nothing.
I called Ascencia and was told to wait a few more days, and we did. In the meantime we were asked to sign affidavits affirming that we were not the ones who had made the purchases. Incidentally I have no way of knowing what drugs the thief ordered but I hope for his own sake he got something good like Oxycontin or Valium and not just some antidepressant or fatty fatty Phentermine.
Still nothing from the bank so we called back. Again. This time I was placed on hold while the service rep called the third-party company that makes and distributes the debit cards to all the happy boys and girls. When the rep came back on the line she explained that for whatever reason no cards had originally been ordered to be mailed out, but she was going to order them now to be overnighted to us so that we would have them in due course. Well, sure enough, a couple of overnights later, the cards arrived via DHL.
But alas, the cards did not work. I tried a number of times to activate them through an ATM and also at the grocery store register where I'd have to key in my PIN. Each time I was told by the ATM that my transaction could not be processed, and my favorite crotchety checkout lady at Kroger just looked at me like I was some deadbeat dad with no money and a soiled credit record. This is the same lady that scolds me for not buckling my kid into the grocery cart seat or for not bundling her up well enough to protect her from the elements, but anyway I digress further.
Sorry, this whole thing just has me worked up.
When I called Ascencia back to tell them my further misfortune, they informed me that while my cards were overnighted to me, my PINs would not arrive for another week or so. Dearest Ascencia Bank, what EFFING good does it do me to receive cards in the mail I cannot use? What do you think I would do with a non-functioning debit card? Sleep with it like some attachment object the same way a kid goes to bed with a favorite teddy bear? Well, I don't. My Amex maybe, but not by bootleg debit card.
After several more days of waiting and making do with nothing but our 12.9% credit and good looks for payment, the PINs finally arrived. Hooray for PINs! Like a kid in a candy store with a blank check, I hurried off to the nearest ATM to activate the card with the newly arrived personal identification number.
No dice.
Apparently my multiple attempts at having previously tried to activate the card with the wrong PIN put a red flag on the card so that now when I tried to activate it with the correct PIN it was too late. I don't know what about this frustrated me more, that I still did not have a working debit card or that I was going to have to once again call my bank. With gritted teeth, I got Ascencia on the horn. The conversation went something like this:
"Hi, my name's Kevin and I just received the PINs in the mail for two cards I had already been overnighted, and I think my card is deactivated because I originally used an incorrect PIN."
"I spoke with you before. Remember, I told you you were going to have to wait for the PINs in the mail before you used the card?" the rep said.
Time out.
The phrase I told you is rather accusatory and therefor needs to be reserved for scolding children. Gentle reader, can you ever remember a time that someone said I told you and they weren't in some way admonishing you because you handled a situation differently than how they thought you should have handled it? I thought not. I worked in a call center. The phrase I told you, much like any use of the imperative form, shouldn't be used in any type of customer correspondence.
Secondly IF this customer service rep told me to wait until my personal identification numbers came in the mail (and honestly I don't remember being told that by her or anyone else), she would have had to have said that only AFTER I deactivated the card unknowingly by keying in the wrong PIN and not before. How wrong was it of me to assume that because my bank went to the expense of overnighting cards to me that they should work with the PINs I already had? Otherwise would that same bank have not also overnighted the PINs to me as well? Am I some super genious or should any monkey be able to figure this out?
Thirdly, even IF this customer service rep had warned me to not try and activate the new cards without first having received new corresponding PINs and even IF I ran out to activate them against her advice just to piss off my bank (I didn't, mind you, but I'm just saying for argument's sake) what damn difference does it make? That still wouldn't have changed the fact that I needed this rep's assistance in resetting my PIN. What good would it have done her or me or any of the other customers waiting on hold for her to take the time to shame me by saying I told you so?
And finally -- yes, I have as many as four reasons as to why this rep was amiss in her telephone behavior -- she did not run me through the security questions Ascencia normally requires of me before they dole out personal information about my account over the phone. She did not ask me for my Social Security number. She did not ask me for my mother's maiden name. She didn't ask me for so much as my account number, which by the way is readily available to anyone to whom I've written a check but at LEAST it would have been some form of verification on her part. She just happily went about her way admonishing this wayward caller whose ID she had no way of knowing.
For all she knew I could have been the man in the moon! Even if her phone is equipped with technology that identifies the number I'm calling from as matching the home number they have on file for me, she doesn't know that I'm not some crazy roommate pretending to be someone I'm not with the hopes of gaining someone else's personal financial information. How does she know my wife and I don't rent out a room and thus share a phone line with the Unibomber?
That shit is wrong.
I desperately try not to cop an attitude when I'm on the phone with a customer service rep for reasons I've outlined here. I like to think that when I had Ascencia on the phone that last time I maintained my calm demeanor. I did make a passive attempt to rectify my situation by simply mentioning another service representative in my response to the surly one with the hopes of getting passed on to someone I felt would be more willing to help out, and, by the way, this worked.
Surly Rep promptly kept me on hold while I assume she bitched to Much More Accommodating and Jovial Rep who ended up being more than happy to rectify my situation with little chitchat much less scolding, and she threw in some good ol' fashioned bless your heart. I don't care if when she disconnected the call Accommodating Rep made fun of me and joked with her next-cube neighbor that I was an incompetent dumbass. She was polite when she had me on the phone, and that's all that matters.
I don't know that I plan on firing my bank any time soon. Ascencia does offer some good rates and in all honesty this has been my first negative experience with them. And like I said, they did credit my account with money I never thought I'd see again which I appreciated. I just have little tolerance for those who can't adequately handle what should have been a simple customer request.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Traveling Tuesday
Not long after my seventeenth birthday I took my first trip overseas. I was to stay with a family who lived in Seyssinet, a small city near Grenoble in the southeastern part of France, but because the student group I was with flew on KLM, I had a brief stopover in the Amsterdam airport. While the layover was just barely three hours long and I never stepped foot outside the terminal, I still think of this as my first introduction to European culture.
I forget exactly how many other soon-to-be exchange students were traveling with me, probably about twelve or fifteen or so, but we were all saddled with the responsibility of looking after each others' bags if someone wanted to get up and walk around or go to the bathroom. Nowadays I don't know if this would fly even in a European airport what with all the security warnings and not-letting-bags-out-of-your-sight business, but this was 1989 so security measures were lax by today's standards.
Being the non-trusting soul that I was even then however, I chose not to part with my carry-on. If I recall correctly I had a six-pack of Diet Coke in there, and I didn't want some travel mate from a rival school stealing them just for the taste of it. When I had to go to the bathroom, I took the bag in with me.
At this time, most European airports ranked up there with bus terminals or rest areas in the amenities department. Sure the men's room in the Amsterdam airport had toilets, urinals, sinks and even showers, but high school locker rooms during half time must have smelled better than this place. And it was terribly drab. No Sports page hanging on the wall . No soft rock Muzak playing in the background and no signs announcing We're Glad Georgia's On Your Mind or Mayor Shirley Franklin Welcomes You or whatever the Dutch equivalent would be. What it did have though was something I had never seen in an American airport bathroom at that time or even since, an airport worker who happened to be female.
It struck me as odd when I first stepped in. She didn't look up from her mopping, but I glanced at her long enough to know she was a woman. I hesitated thinking maybe this bathroom was out of order for cleaning, but no, this was Europe and asking a woman to mop the men's room while she watched all her efforts rendered pointless by the many haphazard dribblers from across the globe was not unheard of.
She also was Black which, for whatever reason, struck me as odd. Her skin was very dark complected and weathered maybe by age or hard living or the daily stress endured by first generation immigrants, which, now looking back, I'd guess she was. I suppose at seventeen I pictured Europe as lilly White. Kinda like the National Hockey League but with more teeth per capita. What did I know?
She paid me no mind, so I made my way to the urinal and sat down my bag, thus making it easier to go about my bidness. Just moments afterward . . . mid-stream if you will . . . she decided my luggage was in her way and picked it up to move it to one side. She never looked up. She just scooted the bag over, mopped where it had been, and then put it back where she had found it. Slightly unnerved I kept my eye on it the whole time. Did I mention there were Diet Cokes in there?
Anyway, when I rejoined the group I didn't say anything about the woman I had seen working in the men's restroom. In fact, I made a point of not saying anything to anyone. I think a common characteristic of young Americans going abroad is that we fancied ourselves being no longer subject to the rules of prudent etiquette practiced by those back at home. Being adolescents in a foreign and notably more permissive land, we were above such constraints.
Sure we were from the South, but we were Southerners bound for Europe. I felt I should have no more been fazed by a mop-wielding immigrée in the men's room than I would a topless sun bather in Paris' Bois de Boulogne or a scantily clad sex worker in Amsterdam's red light district, two things I later saw on subsequent European sojourns. And even if such things did faze me, I shouldn't let on to members of my peer group that they fazed me. At seventeen that would only be admitting my own chastity and therefore sacrificing my reputation as an upcoming Bohemian libertine. OK, I'm stretching, but you get the point.
A bon vivant with a hint of bad boy was another label I had hoped to invent for myself on that trip, so my next move was up to the nearest bar. It didn't matter that European-based flights originating from the U.S. generally get in well before noon or that, being from a relatively dry family, I had very limited experience with alcohol. Upperclassmen who had made this trip before me had shared their own alcohol-related stories so I knew such an indulgence was easily obtainable. I was right.
The bartender, who was dressed in a black vest and matching trousers, was more than happy to accommodate what was his only customer at the time.
"And for you?" he asked as he wiped down the bar.
"Rum and Coke?" I asked not knowing whether his English was sufficient to grasp either of the two ingredients. For all I knew at the time asking for either rum or Coca-Cola in Holland could have been like asking for buttermilk biscuits with sawmill gravy. But he confirmed my order.
"Bacardi and Coke," he said and went to mixing.
I paid whatever was necessary to walk away with the glass and leave a small gratuity. I'm sure the drink was ridiculously expensive, but this trip happened long before the euro would enter the financial scene and I had only a minimal amount of Dutch guilder. If I wasn't going to spend it in the Amsterdam airport, it would have gone to waste. So I got a little something to take the edge off, or more accurately to flaunt in front of an audience.
I needn't have taken but a few sips before a few girls from the group approached me and asked me what I was drinking.
"Oh, it's just a rum and Coke," I tried to say nonchalantly, "I got it from over there."
Then the questions came all at once. "Did he ask you for I.D.?" "Did you order in English?" "Do you think I could get one too if I asked."
"You have to say Bacardi and Coke," I said self-assuredly. And my fellow travel mates left me for the bar thus following me down the path of impropriety.
Two of them got the same drink as I did, probably concerned that any variation from the tried and true might have not resulted in the desired outcome. Whether they liked rum or Coke for that matter probably made no difference. One girl strayed from the norm and scored a vodka tonic. Sexy, I thought. She proved herself to be even gutsier when she disappeared from the group and reappeared with a stamp in her passport because she dared venture outside the international terminal and through Dutch customs.
It wasn't long after we finished our drinks that it was time to board the plane that would carry us on to Paris. The bulk of our foreign travel and the experiences it would bring had yet to transpire, but I think we all felt like we had already taken that first step toward prospering in a foreign land. Sure, Amsterdam is about as English-speaking as Atlanta and airports, even of the international variety, aren't exactly cultural Meccas, but we were thousands of miles from home and yet still managed to get what we wanted. I, like the other scofflaws in that small group, boarded the plane with a smug smile on my face.
And booze on my breath.
I'm not making any promises because I once tried to have a regular feature on my blog only to let it fizzle out after two brief write-ups, but I'm considering taking time out on Tuesdays to blog about past travel experiences. Any thoughts?
I forget exactly how many other soon-to-be exchange students were traveling with me, probably about twelve or fifteen or so, but we were all saddled with the responsibility of looking after each others' bags if someone wanted to get up and walk around or go to the bathroom. Nowadays I don't know if this would fly even in a European airport what with all the security warnings and not-letting-bags-out-of-your-sight business, but this was 1989 so security measures were lax by today's standards.
Being the non-trusting soul that I was even then however, I chose not to part with my carry-on. If I recall correctly I had a six-pack of Diet Coke in there, and I didn't want some travel mate from a rival school stealing them just for the taste of it. When I had to go to the bathroom, I took the bag in with me.
At this time, most European airports ranked up there with bus terminals or rest areas in the amenities department. Sure the men's room in the Amsterdam airport had toilets, urinals, sinks and even showers, but high school locker rooms during half time must have smelled better than this place. And it was terribly drab. No Sports page hanging on the wall . No soft rock Muzak playing in the background and no signs announcing We're Glad Georgia's On Your Mind or Mayor Shirley Franklin Welcomes You or whatever the Dutch equivalent would be. What it did have though was something I had never seen in an American airport bathroom at that time or even since, an airport worker who happened to be female.
It struck me as odd when I first stepped in. She didn't look up from her mopping, but I glanced at her long enough to know she was a woman. I hesitated thinking maybe this bathroom was out of order for cleaning, but no, this was Europe and asking a woman to mop the men's room while she watched all her efforts rendered pointless by the many haphazard dribblers from across the globe was not unheard of.
She also was Black which, for whatever reason, struck me as odd. Her skin was very dark complected and weathered maybe by age or hard living or the daily stress endured by first generation immigrants, which, now looking back, I'd guess she was. I suppose at seventeen I pictured Europe as lilly White. Kinda like the National Hockey League but with more teeth per capita. What did I know?
She paid me no mind, so I made my way to the urinal and sat down my bag, thus making it easier to go about my bidness. Just moments afterward . . . mid-stream if you will . . . she decided my luggage was in her way and picked it up to move it to one side. She never looked up. She just scooted the bag over, mopped where it had been, and then put it back where she had found it. Slightly unnerved I kept my eye on it the whole time. Did I mention there were Diet Cokes in there?
Anyway, when I rejoined the group I didn't say anything about the woman I had seen working in the men's restroom. In fact, I made a point of not saying anything to anyone. I think a common characteristic of young Americans going abroad is that we fancied ourselves being no longer subject to the rules of prudent etiquette practiced by those back at home. Being adolescents in a foreign and notably more permissive land, we were above such constraints.
Sure we were from the South, but we were Southerners bound for Europe. I felt I should have no more been fazed by a mop-wielding immigrée in the men's room than I would a topless sun bather in Paris' Bois de Boulogne or a scantily clad sex worker in Amsterdam's red light district, two things I later saw on subsequent European sojourns. And even if such things did faze me, I shouldn't let on to members of my peer group that they fazed me. At seventeen that would only be admitting my own chastity and therefore sacrificing my reputation as an upcoming Bohemian libertine. OK, I'm stretching, but you get the point.
A bon vivant with a hint of bad boy was another label I had hoped to invent for myself on that trip, so my next move was up to the nearest bar. It didn't matter that European-based flights originating from the U.S. generally get in well before noon or that, being from a relatively dry family, I had very limited experience with alcohol. Upperclassmen who had made this trip before me had shared their own alcohol-related stories so I knew such an indulgence was easily obtainable. I was right.
The bartender, who was dressed in a black vest and matching trousers, was more than happy to accommodate what was his only customer at the time.
"And for you?" he asked as he wiped down the bar.
"Rum and Coke?" I asked not knowing whether his English was sufficient to grasp either of the two ingredients. For all I knew at the time asking for either rum or Coca-Cola in Holland could have been like asking for buttermilk biscuits with sawmill gravy. But he confirmed my order.
"Bacardi and Coke," he said and went to mixing.
I paid whatever was necessary to walk away with the glass and leave a small gratuity. I'm sure the drink was ridiculously expensive, but this trip happened long before the euro would enter the financial scene and I had only a minimal amount of Dutch guilder. If I wasn't going to spend it in the Amsterdam airport, it would have gone to waste. So I got a little something to take the edge off, or more accurately to flaunt in front of an audience.
I needn't have taken but a few sips before a few girls from the group approached me and asked me what I was drinking.
"Oh, it's just a rum and Coke," I tried to say nonchalantly, "I got it from over there."
Then the questions came all at once. "Did he ask you for I.D.?" "Did you order in English?" "Do you think I could get one too if I asked."
"You have to say Bacardi and Coke," I said self-assuredly. And my fellow travel mates left me for the bar thus following me down the path of impropriety.
Two of them got the same drink as I did, probably concerned that any variation from the tried and true might have not resulted in the desired outcome. Whether they liked rum or Coke for that matter probably made no difference. One girl strayed from the norm and scored a vodka tonic. Sexy, I thought. She proved herself to be even gutsier when she disappeared from the group and reappeared with a stamp in her passport because she dared venture outside the international terminal and through Dutch customs.
It wasn't long after we finished our drinks that it was time to board the plane that would carry us on to Paris. The bulk of our foreign travel and the experiences it would bring had yet to transpire, but I think we all felt like we had already taken that first step toward prospering in a foreign land. Sure, Amsterdam is about as English-speaking as Atlanta and airports, even of the international variety, aren't exactly cultural Meccas, but we were thousands of miles from home and yet still managed to get what we wanted. I, like the other scofflaws in that small group, boarded the plane with a smug smile on my face.
And booze on my breath.
I'm not making any promises because I once tried to have a regular feature on my blog only to let it fizzle out after two brief write-ups, but I'm considering taking time out on Tuesdays to blog about past travel experiences. Any thoughts?
Friday, February 1, 2008
AAA child's passport photo
Meryl and I set out today to the nearest AAA office in order to get her photo taken for a passport. Sure, passport photos can be acquired just about anywhere for a minimal fee including the post office which is right around the corner from us, but my wife informed me that because we are AAA members, I could pick them up for free at the local office. Huzzah! No matter that the AAA office was 30 minutes away and therefore required almost a quarter of a tank of gas in order to get there and back home. Free is free, and being the cheap bastard that I am, I leaped at the opportunity to scarf up something at relatively little cost.
Meryl looked smashing too. I put her in a white-yet-wintry warm dress and some bright red tights. I know these don't show up in a headshot, but I think it's important for my kid to look good when we go out. You never know when you're going to bump shoulders with a Gerber talent scout or something. Besides, if you look good, you feel good, and that's important for a toddler trying not to look like a terrorist. I even kept a comb in my pocket so I could neaten her up when we got there.
GPS Lady guided us down the three expressways into the neighboring county, and we reached our destination with little difficulty. The AAA office is located in a 1960s strip mall in what they like to call the Northlake Quadrangle. As a side note, I've decided the word quadrangle needs to be used more frequently lest it die out all together, so I'm going to try and incorporate it into my daily speech. I parked the car, combed a few tangles out of Meryl's hair and went in.
"Hi, I just need to get some passport photos," I said to the woman behind the counter while handing her my membership card.
"OK, hers'll just be ten dollars," the woman said to me.
"It's not free if I'm a member?" I asked with solemn face.
"No, hers isn't. Yours is free though," she said smiling.
"But I don't need one for me."
I already have a passport, and while the picture in it is not particularly flattering, I'm not going to go to the trouble of reporting my passport as lost, getting a new picture and paying the fee just to get a replacement. I've thought about it, mind you, but again I'm cheap and even my vanity doesn't merit that much extra spending. What do I care if the way I'm smiling in the picture makes the right side of my face look bigger than the left? So far no one's turned me away from customs either at home or abroad.
I do harbor some fear though that someday a Customs official at JFK is going to look at the picture and shout out where everyone can hear Hey, Pal, didn't you read the sign? It says 'Keep Hoof and Mouth Disease Out of America'! Then I'll have to wave goodbye to my wife and daughter while I get escorted off to quarantine by two guys wearing those weird anti-germ suits they had to wear before carrying off E.T. in a similar fashion.
I broke down and handed over my credit card.
The woman, who couldn't have been more polite, was trying to get a reaction out of Meryl from the moment we walked in. Meryl though is a finicky child. She doesn't like it when people try too hard and can sometimes be quite obstinate when it comes to not giving in to the demands of strangers. I'd like to think this would hold true even if the stranger in question were offering her candy, but somehow I doubt it. Meryl's pride I fear comes cheaper than her father's vanity.
Unfortunately for me though this stranger had no candy to offer so my daughter looked at the woman's camera as though it were an infringement upon her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of doing whatever she wants. At 21 months of age Meryl has ventured into that stage where she is struggling to gain independence and performing simple tasks like standing up facing forward in the chair in front of the white background and remaining still for four seconds while this nice lady takes her picture isn't high up on her to-do list.
The AAA lady asked if maybe Meryl would prefer I snap the picture. Good idea, I thought, but this still didn't prove very effective. I would take a photo right as Meryl waved her hands in front of her face or right as she turned her head to gawk at the decorations hanging from the ceiling or right as her expression devolved from happy kid to crabby kid. She's gonna be stuck with the passport and the photo for five years so I want it to look halfway decent if at all possible. Though, maybe it would serve as a teaching tool when she gets older if I can say to her Here, see how you look when you're whining?
Eventually Meryl flashed a look that, while not overly smiley, wasn't overly frowny either, and she was facing forward. I took the picture while the woman held a toy over my head hoping to get Meryl's attention.
This is what we ended up with:
What do you think? Would you allow this kid into our borders?
Even if she was traveling with this man?
Our operators are standing by.
Meryl looked smashing too. I put her in a white-yet-wintry warm dress and some bright red tights. I know these don't show up in a headshot, but I think it's important for my kid to look good when we go out. You never know when you're going to bump shoulders with a Gerber talent scout or something. Besides, if you look good, you feel good, and that's important for a toddler trying not to look like a terrorist. I even kept a comb in my pocket so I could neaten her up when we got there.
GPS Lady guided us down the three expressways into the neighboring county, and we reached our destination with little difficulty. The AAA office is located in a 1960s strip mall in what they like to call the Northlake Quadrangle. As a side note, I've decided the word quadrangle needs to be used more frequently lest it die out all together, so I'm going to try and incorporate it into my daily speech. I parked the car, combed a few tangles out of Meryl's hair and went in.
"Hi, I just need to get some passport photos," I said to the woman behind the counter while handing her my membership card.
"OK, hers'll just be ten dollars," the woman said to me.
"It's not free if I'm a member?" I asked with solemn face.
"No, hers isn't. Yours is free though," she said smiling.
"But I don't need one for me."
I already have a passport, and while the picture in it is not particularly flattering, I'm not going to go to the trouble of reporting my passport as lost, getting a new picture and paying the fee just to get a replacement. I've thought about it, mind you, but again I'm cheap and even my vanity doesn't merit that much extra spending. What do I care if the way I'm smiling in the picture makes the right side of my face look bigger than the left? So far no one's turned me away from customs either at home or abroad.
I do harbor some fear though that someday a Customs official at JFK is going to look at the picture and shout out where everyone can hear Hey, Pal, didn't you read the sign? It says 'Keep Hoof and Mouth Disease Out of America'! Then I'll have to wave goodbye to my wife and daughter while I get escorted off to quarantine by two guys wearing those weird anti-germ suits they had to wear before carrying off E.T. in a similar fashion.
I broke down and handed over my credit card.
The woman, who couldn't have been more polite, was trying to get a reaction out of Meryl from the moment we walked in. Meryl though is a finicky child. She doesn't like it when people try too hard and can sometimes be quite obstinate when it comes to not giving in to the demands of strangers. I'd like to think this would hold true even if the stranger in question were offering her candy, but somehow I doubt it. Meryl's pride I fear comes cheaper than her father's vanity.
Unfortunately for me though this stranger had no candy to offer so my daughter looked at the woman's camera as though it were an infringement upon her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of doing whatever she wants. At 21 months of age Meryl has ventured into that stage where she is struggling to gain independence and performing simple tasks like standing up facing forward in the chair in front of the white background and remaining still for four seconds while this nice lady takes her picture isn't high up on her to-do list.
The AAA lady asked if maybe Meryl would prefer I snap the picture. Good idea, I thought, but this still didn't prove very effective. I would take a photo right as Meryl waved her hands in front of her face or right as she turned her head to gawk at the decorations hanging from the ceiling or right as her expression devolved from happy kid to crabby kid. She's gonna be stuck with the passport and the photo for five years so I want it to look halfway decent if at all possible. Though, maybe it would serve as a teaching tool when she gets older if I can say to her Here, see how you look when you're whining?
Eventually Meryl flashed a look that, while not overly smiley, wasn't overly frowny either, and she was facing forward. I took the picture while the woman held a toy over my head hoping to get Meryl's attention.
This is what we ended up with:
What do you think? Would you allow this kid into our borders?
Even if she was traveling with this man?
Our operators are standing by.
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