Open Letter to Myself

Dear Self,

For the love of god, stop complaining about the weather in Chicago. Yes, it's the end of May. Yes, it's only 65 degrees. Yes, it's mostly cloudy, and threatening to rain, just like it has been 5 of the last 6 days. Yes, it dropped 15 degrees in an hour yesterday, and you were freezing on the way home from the library.

Two choices. Move, or shut up. It's like this every year, and every year you complain about it. Everyone you know is really sick of it, I'm sure.

The average high temperature for May in Chicago is 70 degrees, and that's at O'Hare, and as close as you live to the lake, it's always going to be like this. So again, move to Naperville, or Cincinnati or Phoenix (there may be other options, I'm not sure), or shut up. It's 68 now, that should be fine. Go outside already.

Also, please don't forget to take the garbage out. That is all.

Regards,
Self

A Gift

So yesterday, after a spirited set of tennis at the park with the roommate (he lost his serve halfway through, and to be fair, was feeling the aftereffect of the sleep aid he took the night before, so it was more competitive than the final 6-2 score would indicate), I saw something hanging from the front door. Usually, something in a little hanging bag on the front door like that would be a course catalog/brochure from the local community college, or a flaming bag of poo.

But this was a book, with a green leatherette cover, with a brochure tucked in with it. The faux-gold leaf detail was the first tip, this was a religious tract. Oh goody.

See, we live in what the roommate has called "the most liberal Zip code outside of San Francisco," so we have people of many faiths and races here. I'm not sure if that makes us more fertile recruiting ground for the Jehovah's Witnesses and the other proselytizers or less, but we do get the occasional knock on the door that we have to politely blow off. But it turns out this was different...

Dear Neighbor,

Please accept the enclosed book as a
gift from the Muslim community...

And thus I saw the title "The English Translation of the Message of the Quran." Hmm, this was new.

Then I had a stunning moment of self-awareness (not really stunning, and probably not all that self-aware). The fact that it was the holy text for one religion I don't believe in (Islam) made it somehow better than it being the holy text for another religion I don't believe in (Christianity). Does that make me the kind of namby-pamby liberal that Ann Coulter (who is anything but a Christian) is always on about? I can hear her sneering "oh, sure, they love the Quran, but if it was a Bible, they'd have had some kind of fit." And she'd be entirely missing the point, but she'd also have a grain of truth in there. Because if it had been a bible, I'd have scanned up and down the block to see if the people delivering them were still there, and if so, I'd have jogged my copy back to them and said something charming like "here, don't waste the dead tree on trying to tell me about your invisible man in the sky." But since it wasn't the Bible, I actually set it down on the kitchen table, with absolutely no intention of reading it, but certainly no intention of making a show of tossing it out, either.

So is the Christian Right, which of course really is neither (no, I never will get tired of that joke, why do you ask?) actually correct about me? Or is it simply that complicated but genuine notion that I was raised to be more polite to the neighbors than to my family? The president keeps talking about having more respect for those that disagree with us, and I keep thinking "yeah, what he said" without really considering if I need to do the same.

Sorry, I guess this is one of those posts that raises more questions (1) than it answers (0). But that's what you get for now.

Reading is Fun, Learning How is Really Irritating

So the boy, as you can see from the little "About Me" section over there, is 5 years old. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. He's adorable and precocious, and just generally a lot of fun/work. But there's a growing issue, and it involves the unholy marriage between learning and entertainment that is PBS (more accurately, PBS Kids).

Our morning routine, at least for the last few months (those months corresponding to those in which I have nowhere in particular to be in the mornings) has been pretty stable. With the exception of the days when Mommy takes the late train and lets Daddy sleep in, we (the boy and I) get up at 7ish, stumble downstairs (he bounds, I stumble), fish a granola bar out of the box, and turn on the TV (at this point, a lot of you parents out there are thinking "Gah! You turn the TV on in the morning? Don't you know that the latest research indicates that the developing neuroreceptors of preschoolers are 11% more likely to show a decreased response to stimuli if they are allowed to watch television before 11AM?!?!? Don't you love your child?!?!?" I'm here to tell you now: shut up. Seriously. Shut the hell up, and go back to making your child a neurotic germophobic wreck by subtly resenting him for taking away what was doubtless a promising social life). The choice on TV was automatic, to the point where we didn't even need to discuss it most mornings. One episode of Curious George, one granola bar, one glass of milk. He could watch the first one (each episode has two separate cartoons) while he ate the granola bar, then get dressed during the second one, and if you need me, I'll be dozing off on the couch over here, the dulcet tones of narrator William H. Macy gently drifting into my last few moments of attempted sleep for the day. When George was over, it was time to put on shoes (both of us), and get off to school/daycare/whatever it is.

Recently, though, events have conspired to change this hard-earned routine, and I'm partially to blame. First, there haven't been many new episodes of Curious George lately, and it really started to get old. If I had to watch the one where George and Hundley are on the deserted tropical island (that exists approximately half an hour off the coast of what is generally assumed to be New York, but I'll save that for a "Kids' TV nitpicks" mega-post that will probably have to be published in multiple 8,000 word segments) one more time, I was going to have to take Mr. Macy hostage. So I deleted a few from the DVR, and went about searching for another show or two to record, just to freshen things up. And that's how we ended up with "Word World."

For the uninitiated, Word World is a PBS show where all the characters and many objects are made out of letters that roughly form the shape of the thing. Thus, dog. And so on. In this universe, if you needed, for example, a ball, you would need to find a "b," an "a," and two "l"s, then put them together, wherein they would magically cling together in the shape of a ball. Again, nitpicks aside (what sort of matter are these letters made of? How do they know what kind of ball?), the annoying part is that a) it generally takes the characters the entire 7 minute segment to find the requisite 4 to 5 letters, even though it's a known fact that Dog has a giant pile of all sorts of letters strewn about his house, and b) you have to do the word building while singing "It's time to build a word/Let's build it/Let's build it...Yeah!" to what I believe is an old House beat from the mid-90s. Needless to say, I can't really doze off during this.

Of course, the boy is mesmerized. And this morning, just as I was considering donating the TV to charity or stabbing my eardrums with a knitting needle (and subsequently lamenting the fact that we don't own knitting needles), I hear "Map...m-a-p. Ball...b-a-l-l. Drink...d-...daddy, how do you spell drink?" "Mmmph..rrrgh...erfft...nnnenggh" I replied, which apparently was close enough. "Drink...d-r-i-n-k."

"Good job, buddy," I said, and then it occurred to me. Drink wasn't one of the words on the show, and ball was yesterday. Holy crap, this stuff just might be working. I wonder if there's a new episode this afternoon...