Championable | Love, parenting, politics.

Shocked. Shocked, I was, at how my recruiter expressed her level of stress.

Love to all. Even you, noseblow-mcbooger.

Love to all.  Even you, the lady who was aggressively interviewing the Radio Shack employee about her BlackBerry training.

It’s 12:31am, and I’ve erased her.  All the furniture that was in her room is gone, and all of the things that were moved out of her room are back in.  I also replaced the fan in the TiVo 3, which is somewhat beside the point.

I don’t know why I felt like I had to do this tonight, but I couldn’t go to sleep until the house was restored to it’s pre-Mother-in-Law condition.

Good night.

Love to all.  Even you.

Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us.

- Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5

It turns out my mother-in-law knew she was leaving weeks ago, and there’s a good chance she’ll be in Mexico by this Saturday.

We’ve been duped. Alcoholism wins, even before the drinking starts.

Love to all. Even you, nervous reader.

My mother-in-law has decided to move back to her house. Tomorrow.

She is less than 90 days sober. She can’t lift a bag of groceries. She is too weak to take out the garbage. She had agreed to stay at our house for 3 - 6 months after getting out of rehab. It has been less than two.

Her reason? “It’s hectic living with children.”

That, my friends, is an enormous pile of bullshit. Not the sentence itself, but the use of the kids as an excuse to bail on her commitments. The kids aren’t home from 8 am to 3pm, and often later than that. She only sees them for three to five hours a day, and much of that time they are playing games in the basement.

Maggie asked if she would at least stay until Friday, when she was supposed to be celebrating her youngest son’s birthday. That request was met, literally, with silence.

Understandably, Maggie is pissed off, scared, and highly disappointed.

My mother-in-law’s fingernails tell a physical truth.  From the cuticle to the middle (the most recent growth), they are healthy and normal.  Going forward, they are mottled and yellow.  You can see when she went to rehab in her fucking fingernails.

She leaves, she dies.  That’s my opinion.  I hope I’m wrong, because she’s leaving.

Love to all. Even you, Kathleen.

I filter my oldest son’s internet access. I  have a whitelist-only  instant messaging system. He’s not allowed to IM with anyone I haven’t explicitly granted permission. The web content filtering is more granular, but it seems to be doing the trick.

A while back, we had a little issue with my son trying to go to websites that weren’t, shall we say, age-appropriate. Since then, I have made it absolutely clear that I am logging everything that happens on his machine. I told him that I had no plans to regularly check the logs, but that he should know that they existed.

I wasn’t lying. His machine logs all IM converations, blocked websites, accessed websites… but I really didn’t check the logs. Until Sunday.

I had actually gone to his machine to run a bunch of updates and add my work IM to his whitelist. And, curious dad that I am, I flipped through, quickly, the last couple of IM conversations he had with a girl.

The first sentence I saw was this: “My fucking cat has been stuck in a tree for the last hour.”

This kind of shocked me, because I had NEVER heard him use language before. Then again, when I was his age, I used different language with my friends than I did with my family. The fact that it was on an IM, with a young lady… this bothered me a bit. Enough that I flipped to the next IM.

This one freaked me out. He asked the same girl if “she had frenched [some guy] yet.”

Now, the minor reason this bugged me is because, two weeks ago, we had a conversation about what that really meant. So it was strange to suddenly see him talking about it like some expert.

The MAJOR reason this bugged me was because he was asking questions of a sexual nature to a girl, online.  This was an absolute no-no.
Putting aside the fact that if I saw someone IM that crap to my daughter, I’d ban that kid for life (and consider firebombing his house)…  my son needs to learn fast and early that things are NOT equal, and a young woman may not feel comfortable with that kind of talk and MORE importantly, she may not have the confidence to SAY she isn’t comfortable.  So you can’t do it.  Ever.

Maggie wound up having the conversation with him last night, because I was working late and she decided to roll it in with the fact that he got sent to the principal for throwing snowballs. We had planned to have it as a team. I’m going to follow up with him, though, because he needs to hear it, gently, from a guy’s persepective.

FYI, my son was absolutely mortified by the whole thing. He’s a good kid, and is clearly finding his way as a young man.

Parenting is crazy, man. Crazy.

Love to all. Even you, ticket salesman.

 Sometimes, a man needs a meme to kickstart his blogging career. And Ms. Chili not only provided that, but she provided a MANLY meme. So rock it. Here goes.

1. Boxers? Briefs? Boxer briefs? Thongs? Commando?

Boxer-briefs. Best of both worlds, man. Although I often wear plain boxers around the house, as some of you might have noticed on my YouTube posts. Ahem.

2. What’s your fussiest personal care routine?

I don’t have one. I’m MANLY, dammit.

3. Do you have a favorite tool? Power or manual?

My favorite tool is my 8-core Mac Pro. My favorite non-electronic tool is a paper clip.

4. Can you change your own oil? Do you?

I could, but I don’t. And frankly, I’d need to RTFM.

5. What’s the “manliest” thing you do on a regular basis?

Bang my wife. (I’m not sayin’ “make love” during a Manly Meme!)

6. What’s something “manly” that you never learned how to do?

Gut a deer.

7. Do you ever cry? If so, what’s your trigger?

I’ve been known to tear up when thinking about Carter, my old puppy. Every six months or so, I cry over the fact that my parents are so unbelievably fucked up that they’ve missed the last five years of my kids. And me.

8. Do you have a chivalrous streak? How does it manifest itself?

Totally. I open doors. I call women “ma’am.” I let ladies go first in nearly all circumstances. I let Moms-with-Kids skip ahead of me in line. All kinds of little things. I even make sweeping, knight-like gestures to indicate they should go first.

I don’t talk excessively to women to whom I’m being chilvalrous, lest they think I’m just trying to bang them.

9. Do you have a chauvinistic streak? How does it manifest itself?

Internal disdain for rich, white, Westchester women.

10. What’s your favorite movie?

Blade Runner is up there. I’m not really sure.

11. What’s the dumbest, testosterone-inspired thing you’ve ever done?

It’s a 30-way tie of one-night stands. This is separate from non-one-night stands. I had issues.

12. What quality do you think makes a good man good? Do you have that quality?

A real man is confident enough in himself to not be a dickhead. I do have that quality.

13. Toilet seat up or down?

Down, whenever it’s a mixed-gender environment. I used to live with three women. I understand these things. However, when I had my own apartment, I made sure to tell everyone to leave the seat UP.

14. If your wife/partner/significant other is away, do you cook for yourself or eat out of cans and boxes (or rely on local drive-throughs and delivery)?

I’ll usually get take out. Or cans. Or boxes. Or green dog biscuits. YUMMY.

15. What societal expectation of being a man do you most resent?

I’d like to be able to mess with my appearance more for fun, and it would be pretty cool to run around commando in a skirt. But NO, that’s not ACCEPTABLE.

16. What’s the best part - societal-wise - about being a man?

Bathroom lines are WAY shorter, which rocks.
17. Will you stop to ask for directions?

More and more. I used to be TERRIBLE at it. No I just kind of suck.

18. What’s the one thing you wish your wife/partner/significant other understood about how you think or behave?

That my routines are real, and to respect them.

19. What’s one thing about your wife/partner/significant other that you just cannot understand, no matter how hard you try?

Nothing comes to mind.

20. What do you need to have in the shower?

Soap, yo.

21. Do you burp/fart/scratch in public? Do you do anything stereotypically male?

I never do any of those in public. Stereotypically male? I fall in love/lust about a hundred times a day: I work in Manhattan!

22. How big a part does porn play in your life? Your thoughts?

Well, I’m a fan of decent lesbian porn… but that’s a rare thing.

23. What scares you?

Global warming. I honestly think we’re doomed, and that my kids might have a really hard time of it.

24. What’s your best feature (physical or otherwise)?

I’m happy most of the time, and I like have a positive impact on the vibe of wherever I happen to be.25. What would you do for love?

Almost anything. It depends on for whom I was doing these things.

And that is all.  Phew!  Thanks, Ms. Chili!

Love to all.  Even you, the jackass with his hat over his eyes.

I am in such a daze that when I switched dress-codes halfway through the process of getting ready for work, I forgot to change socks. Thus, I’m wearing brown argyles with black Circas. This is bad, even for me.

I’m completely exhausted and unable to think clearly… and totally sick of it.

Whine, whine.

Love to all. Even you, the lady with the fact-free sales pitch.

Lord almighty.  Give me another 24.

Love to all.

Hi there.

I’m surfacing.  Fever’s down to 100 and I can think in… thoughts.

I’m gonna have to reset my feeds and start reading from today, because I’m so far behind.

Hope the last week has treated you well.

Love to all.  Even you, virii.