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Category Archives: Mishpucha (mi familia)
Thirteen Dreams
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| Thirteen Dreams from Doug Tales from the other third of my life (Other people’s dreams are boring as hell. Let’s see if I can make this work.) 1. The earliest dream I can recall: a pixie lives in my closet, and she alerts me to her presence by playing on a tiny piano. She leads me into a room I had never seen, sunlit, full of toys, a world of safety and beauty.2. My grandfather (he of the surgically removed horns, and the monkey in the attic) and I travel to the moon. It’s so small, I could walk around it in a matter of minutes. I jump higher and higher in the low gravity while my grandfather scratches his bald head and mumbles in Yiddish.
3. Late at night, my parents talk quietly near the gas range. All the burners are on, not a pot in sight. “With all of your problems,” my father says, “it’s a wonder you’re not dead.” My mother falls to the kitchen floor, unconscious. (What can I say — she was a bit of a hypochondriac.) 4. I’m in a car with my brother and sister, and we’re pulling away from a home construction site. We leave my mother behind. She wants to give me some food — a Hershey’s chocolate bar, no doubt — and she runs after the car, holding it out for me to grab. She can’t catch up. That one recurred, haunting me for years for reasons I still don’t understand. 5. I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can recall. I used to tell myself stories to pass the hour or two it would take to get to sleep. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know the difference between a remembered dream or one of those stories. In one, I’m a secret agent, poisoning Hitler’s carrot patch. 6. A woman wakes up in the night to an empty bed. She calls out for her husband, but no one answers. In a panic, she runs outside, calling his name. Terror surges; she passes out in the driveway. She wakes up the following morning in her own bed, and does not realize that the experience hours earlier was a waking dream. This is not my dream. 7. A woman watches a chef boil a lobster. The lobster screams as it is lowered into the pot. He takes it out and removes its limbs, one by one. This is not my dream, either. 8. I am amazed at how readily dreams can reprogram decades of memory. In one recurring dream with many variations, I’m back in that state of loneliness I lived in before meeting Karen. A girl or woman (depending upon how old I am in the dream) lets me know she’s interested in me. Together, we take the first step. 9. Oh, lordy, the student’s dream. My favorite remains the one in which I’m late to the final, but I still have 20 or 30 minutes left. I look at the first question, then the second, then the third. Each and every question is nonsensical — essay questions with numerical answers, mathematical equations with multiple choices covering the gamut from “honesty” to “betrayal.” 10. I’m peeing, and I lose control of my aim. Soon, the ceiling and the walls are dripping in urine. 11. My teeth fall out. 12. I’m in a crashing plane, or a car attacked by gunmen, and in a last minute restoration of faith, I recite the Shema. 13. And then there’s the one about the malt shop — you know the kind, red-cushioned spinning stools beside a long, gleaming countertop. Twelve cheerleaders, sweaty from their last workout, sit atop the stools. They are a Godiva Deluxe Assortment of ethnicities, they are all beautiful, and none of them are wearing underwear. Oh, wait. That’s a fantasy, not a dream. My dreams are never that much fun.
5. Sapphire Writer |
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D.
My little humorist
More later. I thought I’d dash this off before fixing dinner.
I’ve been teaching my son grammar from Strunk and White, and from Karen Gordon’s books, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence. He finished reading Gordon’s chapter on commas last week, so now I’m having him go back through it and write sentences demonstrating each of her major points. Here is what he has done so far, uncorrected by yours truly:
Monday:
He barfed, he heaved, he blew his nose.
I barfed Sparky up, and I saw her half-digested tail wagging. Sparky didn’t like being in Sam’s stomach, but she liked his intestines. He wanted lunch and she wanted a heart. He always salted her before eating, but he thought she was bland all the same. [Eeeew.]
I woke up covered in barf [I think I understand the theme of this composition] and said, “Let’s go again! Let’s go again!”
Tuesday:
Sam tumbled and splashed and rolled around in the radioactive waste. When the radio started saying, “Recently there has been a radioactive spill and we would just like to caution everybody from playing in it, that is all”, he started drinking the foul liquid.
Sam drank the water so that he would get 6 extra eyes. From the left, a boy rose up and Sam saw his tentacles. At dark he thought 30 tentacles were enough. Out of the murky water appeared a girl with 6 red eyes and 4 tentacles.
I’ll make him a blogger yet.
D.
Oy, what am I doing wrong?
Here’s what happened:
One of Jake’s pet millipedes died. He fusses over these critters to no end, spraying them once or twice a day with water, giving them bits of lettuce. He didn’t seem too upset by the death, but he kept talking about it. He wanted to show his mom the dead millipede, and she refused, saying it was a yucky, dead, decaying millipede (based on Jake’s description of brown stuff oozing out of its body).
Jake got insulted and demanded an apology. Karen wouldn’t apologize. Meanwhile, he was supposed to be reading his biology, and he kept turning the pages with his feet. Or something like that. I wasn’t there, didn’t see it happen. All I know is, I came upstairs, saw wrinkly pages in his nice new biology textbook, and said, “Um. You know, I wish you wouldn’t mess up your new book.” No anger. I didn’t realize Karen had already said something to him about it.
Next thing I know, we’re in Tantrum Central. Then he kicks me in the shin. Now, I’ve almost never hit this kid. One little slap on the butt to get his attention (at about 18 months old), nothing since, and he’s ten now. So I sent him to his room and told him if he DIDN’T get down to his room right away, no computer for a day. For three days. For a week. (I’m upping the ante because he’s standing there, refusing to go downstairs.)
I think he misunderstood me, because he thought he had to go to his room AND was getting booted off the computer. Next thing I know, he pops out of his room with his pillow, blanket, and flashlight. He leaves the house and begins running away. Slowly.
My parenting skills are exhausted at this point. In the old days, you were supposed to just let the kid go, right? Let him have his temper tantrum and wander back sheepishly. But this isn’t the old days, and besides, we live on a street where folks barrel down in their trucks at 50 MPH. Nevertheless, I had Karen come downstairs (her pelvis has mended well enough that she can get around with a cane, but still) so she could see Jake running away down the driveway in slow motion.
“Go after him,” she said. “Bring him back. I don’t want him walking down the road.”
I met up with him at the entrance to the driveway. Another ‘don’t you think you’re overreacting’ speech, to no effect. He wouldn’t come back. “I’ll carry you back if I have to,” I said, and he said, “You can try.”
I lifted him up and carried him back, with him kicking me in the shins as hard as he could all the way. We put him in his room and left him there. That was about an hour ago.
Karen’s thinking we should punish him extra (for all the shin-kicking): no computer, no TV. But I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this insurrection.
Look, folks. My parenting skills are for sh*t. As a kid, I didn’t get much of an example, and neither did Karen for that matter. Dr. Phil me, people (tell me what to do). Thanks.
D.
Late night variety pak
It’s late, I’m tired, and this is all ya get.
Helen Wheels left one looooong response to my Sunday blog on the rise of fascism in America. I thought about reprinting it here, but it turns out Helen posted the more detailed version on her blog, yesterday. She quotes Lawrence W. Britt’s article on fascism at length, to chilling effect.
Consider that a mighty shout.
Many thanks to Kate and her hubs for turning me on to Campbell & Reece Biology, Seventh Edition. Looks like this is going to be a great experience for my home schooler AND his dad. This beautiful textbook includes a CD with useful material (how rare is that?), and the online resources rock. Tests! They have tests! They sure know how to make home schooling easy.
Jake dove into it with both feet. Right away, the book stimulated a useful discussion on embryogenesis, haploidy, diploidy, gastrulation, and neurulation. We had to backtrack a bit to talk about gametogenesis and fertilization, but I didn’t mind. Damn it, if there’s one thing I’m qualified to teach, it’s biology. No, really, I have a PhD in this stuff (didn’t know that, did ya?)
I warmed to the discussion, eager to share my knowledge of meiosis and mitosis, spermatogenesis and seminal vesicles, ovulation and the menstrual cycle. Then, suitably enlightened, I guided Jake back towards the subjects of fertilization, implantation, and early embryonic development: initial cell divisions, morula (what the Germans call zellballen, IIRC), blastula, morula, gastrula, neurula, embyro.
Me: Any questions?
Jake: I still don’t get how the sperm get up there.
Me: Their tails spin round and round, like little motorboat propellers. They swim up there.
Jake: But how do they get up there?
Me: Well, during orgasm, muscular contractions in the uterus help draw the sperm upward.
Jake: But how do they get up there?
This clearly called for a visual aid.
Moral of the story*: never take anything for granted.
D.
*That part of the story is false. Of course my ten-year-old already knows the basic mechanics of intercourse. He’s my son, for heaven’s sake.
Moral of the story: never discount my willingness to pounce on a cheap visual joke.
A timely Thursday Thirteen
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Thirteen Things about Doug And, dammit, you’d better play this time, or next week, I’ll tag your ass. 1. Goethe, not Nietzsche, said, "What does not kill me makes me stronger." Three intervals in my life put this to the test, but I was not so much tempered by them as torn apart and put back together.
2. As a four-year-old, I was traumatized by a cantaloupe (AKA musk melon). This was not one of those desperate, ego-formative moments. I got over it. 3. My first memory: I’m two, nearly three, and my brother and sister are helping me get dressed in the back seat of my dad’s car. (A blue Chevy, Sis?) It is the first day of my first Voyage of the Damned: summer vacation, driving from LA to Boston to see the rest of the family. It would not be my last such voyage. 4. I liked to get up when my parents got up. They would eat breakfast, drink coffee, and not yell at each other. I hid in the hallway with my back against the wall heater, listening to them talk. My mom didn’t like this. She thought the wall heater would give me “arthuritis.” 5. On that first Voyage of the Damned, we stopped for breakfast in Needles. I saw a red firetruck I dearly wanted. My mother wanted to buy it for me, but my father didn’t. Much psychodrama ensued. 6. We took the southern route that year. One night, in a motel room in the Deep South, we woke up to find the room infested with giant water bugs. Trust me: you really don’t want to click on that link. 7. Bliss for five-year-old me was a day at the beach . . . although I hated it when my mom would towel the sand from my back. Ow. 8. I had my first mathematical epiphany in kindergarten. I told my teacher, Mrs. Biyotch, “One and one are two!” and she replied, “One plus one equals two.” Talk about buzz kills. 9. I loved my pediatrician, Dr. Johnson. Or maybe I just loved ripping off all my clothes as fast as I could. 10. I didn’t like my next doctor, Dr. May. To this day, I don’t understand why a doctor would feel the need to do a rectal exam on a ten-year-old boy (or younger) at every visit. Actually, I do understand, and I don’t like it one bit. 11. Among other childhood fears, I was afraid of the dark, and of mysterious strangers coming into our house. My sister knows why. I didn’t get over my fear of the dark until med school. 12. My grandfather groped me once, but I didn’t hold it against him. (Hah! I love that gag.) No, this wasn’t one of those ego-formative moments, either. 13. To some degree, I live in a constant state of breath-holding, waiting for the next traumatic interval. 1. Dariana |
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D.
The other requisite baby photo
Notice the look of keen intelligence on my face:
I’m about to make either an earth-shaking discovery or a momentous poopie. One of the two.
D.
New toy!
Maybe it’s seasonal affective disorder, our interminable rain, overwork, not enough sleep, lack of exercise, or crappy diet, but I needed a new toy to cheer me up, so I bought myself a scanner. We had a scanner, a decrepit creature abandoned by its maker (we couldn’t find a driver for Windows XP). But this new puppy is state of the art: an HP Scanjet 4850. Not top o’ the line, but more scanner than I need.
I debated with myself what to give you first. A photo of my dad’s parents dancing cheek to cheek? Perhaps a photo of my parents at half my present age, sitting next to one another on the beach? Maybe I should put up the photo of my mom’s dad in a Nazi uniform. (Nope. Gonna save that story for another day.)
No, I decided to post clear-cut evidence of my early attempts to ruin my son’s liver.
Be honest. You have a picture of your son or daughter like this, don’t you? It’s one of those irresistible photo opportunities.
That’s Carta Blanca, by the way — damn near unavailable in Northern California, but it’s our favorite beer. And Jake’s, too, by the look on his face.
Disclaimer for the humor-impaired, the gullible, and the meddlesome: the bottle was empty.
Nearly.
D.
T Lady Down
I wonder if anyone will catch the allusion in this post’s title. Answer below.
Before I get rolling: I’ve emailed my legislators. Have you? Or do you like living in a fascist dictatorship under Emperor Bush? (Non-Americans exempted . . . unless, of course, you are living in a fascist dictatorship, in which case you should write your ombudsmen, or jaegermeisters, or whatever you call ’em.)
In case y’all need an explanation why I’m so upset, check out this handy dandy video. (Kudos to Agitprop — and Blue Gal for pointing me to Agitprop.)
It’s an American staple to put down fatties, but I’m telling you, you zaftigs (Gabriele, help! How do I turn zaftig into a noun and make it plural?) are lucky. If you fall on your ass, you have padding. Not so my 80-something pound wife. She fell last Thursday, and she’s still in bed.
Ultimately, it’s all the fault of her multiple sclerosis. MS led to chemo, which killed her ovaries, which nuked her estrogen, which leached all the calcium from her bones, etc. Evil MS.
She thought she’d pulled a muscle, but her recovery over the weekend left a lot to be desired. When I called her this morning, she told me she really didn’t feel any better, so I rushed home (after first getting anxious as hell, which meant I had to eat several Almond Rochas), brought her to the orthopedic surgeon, and got her leg and hip X-rayed.
Tarantula Lady has a pelvic fracture. The ‘pod assures me it’s a good fracture. Yes, of course there are good and bad fractures. It’s a stable fracture, so it will heal without surgery and without any sort of weird English Patient-style full-body cast, or whatever the hell Ralph Fiennes wore in that silly uber-British movie. (My gawd, I thought I was watching The Mummy.) The ‘pod even wants her to start weight-bearing ASAP. Otherwise, the osteoporosis will only get worse.
Our Las Vegas trip is on perma-hold, so if you were hoping for some acid-tongued snark on the bar girls at Caesar’s Palace, I’ll have to go to our tribal casino instead.
Karen’s holding up okay. The pain meds nauseate her (thank heavens for Zofran), and it’s hard for her to do just about anything. I have only one more day to work, though, and then I’m taking eleven or twelve days off. I hope she’ll be back on her feet by January 2.
Trivia answer:
This entry’s title is a reference to the 1978 submarine movie Gray Lady Down, which starred a Chuck Heston and David Carradine. Truly Le Bad Cinema. I’m shocked IMDB has it at 5.8 out of 10 stars.
Yes, I agree. Karen deserves better than this.
D.
The Strip beckons
Oy, I’m tired. We’ve been squeezing patients into the schedule so that the boy and I can get out of town at the end of the year. It seems like I spent eight hours today shoveling ear wax, which is exhausting, no matter what you might think.
Stick around to the end, and I’ll tell you one of my favorite ear wax stories.
I grew up in a teaching family, which meant my dad had his summers off. Half the time, we vacationed “back East,” visiting relatives in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The other half of the time, we went to Vegas.
I come from a long line of poker players, folks who have (or had) the knack of making money at the table every time. Bliss to my father is an afternoon playing low ball, then coming home forty or fifty bucks in the black. I’m not sure why he avoids the higher stakes table, but soon, I’ll have the opportunity to ask him.
Yup, we’re going to Vegas.
My parents retired to Las Vegas. I wish they would have retired to Maui, Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco, but no, they retired to Vegas. Thus, even though I’m all grown up, half of my vacations still find me in Vegas.
In case you’ve never been, this is what Las Vegas is all about:
Leaving casinos reeking of cigarette smoke, buzzed on other people’s nicotine, tinnitus amped up a few dozen notches thanks to the slot machine noise;
Walnut-brained casino employees chasing us away from one area after another because I have my underage son in tow;
All you can eat buffets where ugly excuse me handsome Americans pile their dishes eighteen inches high with king crab claws (because, after all, it takes energy to go back for fourths and fifths);
Traffic that makes me homesick for Los Angeles;
Freezing cold winters, blistering hot summers.
Why did they retire there?
Anyway, I can’t complain*. They’re flying me and Jake out on their dime, thanks to the fact that our money pit of a house has left us nearly broke. We’ll be there from the 26th to the 1st, so if any of y’all are going to be there, let me know. We can score some free watered-down drinks at Slots-o-fun and flirt with the mini-skirted seventy-year-old hostesses.
Karen gets a pass this time. She’s recovering from a nasty crud, and doesn’t want to get sick so soon after this last illness.
A mom brings her sixteen-year-0ld girl in for an ear cleaning. The second I start scooping brown gold from her canal, she begins moaning like Meg Ryan.
Now Mom’s laughing, my office staff is wondering what the hell I’m doing back there, I’m squirming (thanking my stars I don’t have to stand to clean ear wax), and, unbeknownst to me, a little old lady totters up to our front desk.
“Excuse me, dear,” she says. “Does Dr. Hoffman clean ear wax?”
And my receptionist is trying very hard not to say, “Does he ever!”
D.
*Hah! What am I saying? I live to complain.
The marriage counsellor, Part 2
I have more funny business in store for you later this evening . . . so, Maureen? Chill.
Before I leave behind this discussion of love and marriage, I wanted to share with you a link I found several years ago. I found this two years ago and filed it away for my son (in an envelope labeled For Jacob, when he’s older). I’m not sure what mood possessed me at the time, but it must have been precious.
First, here’s the link:
Ten Terrifying Truths about Marriage by Dr. Michael Tobin
Rereading this, I see a few gems here, but what possessed me to print this out and stuff it in an envelope for my son, to be opened circa 2020? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so crazy. Two items in particular stand out:
2. Try all you want — you’ll never change your partner. However, if you change yourself, your partner may change.
Very true, in my experience. (It’ll be a blast when Karen reads this. She’ll piss herself laughing: You’re kidding, right? When did you ever change?)
8. The greatest gift you can give your children is a loving marriage.
Hmm. I wouldn’t know this from firsthand experience, but I’m hoping my son will tell me one day if it’s true. Maybe that’s why I socked this list away.
Okay, enough with the serious stuff. Time to pull out the whoopee cushions.
D.