Multiplicity

Oh yes, I almost forgot: yesterday, Sophie and I were picking up some Chinese food for lunch, because I was feeling like a lazy fuck and she, being only three years old, is lacking in any mad cooking skillz at this point--perhaps after her first Easy Bake Oven we can reassess her abilities. I was having the Kung Pao chicken, while she is more of a chicken and broccoli sort of girl. She also loves chopsticks, although she is terrible with them so far. I'm going to order her some practice sticks for her birthday, so there's always the chance that she'll be grabbing flies out of the air before she's five. From there it's only a short hop until she kicks the ass of the bad girl in her school during a karate tournament, and her future awesomeness will be cemented.

Actually, none of that is what I meant to tell you.

On our way out of the restaurant and back to the car, we passed a man who looked exactly like me, in some weird David Cronenbergian Dead Ringers kind of way (okay, not that weird--because what could be more weird than identical twin gynecologists? Yep: identical twin cross-dressing Sarah Palin impersonators. Or actually just Sarah Palin herself. Again, I digress.)

As he walked past us, Sophie pointed at him and said, "He is also my daddy, Daddy!"

I don't know why I brought this up, other than it was pretty cute, and also it's good to know that I would be so easily replaceable if I fell into the ocean while crab fishing and drowned.

Sophie Creeps Me Out #1

We were at the library today, because Sophie loves books and I am trying to instill within her the knowledge that libraries are awesome AWESOME AWESOME. Generally our approach is to swing quickly through the "New Releases" section, where I grab one or two books whose covers look interesting (since she is impatient and won't let me stand in the aisle for more than fifteen seconds), and then we are off to the children's wing, where she plays with puppets and puzzles and looks out the glass wall at the garden outside and grabs random books off the shelf for me to read to her. Last week, her favorite was a kid's biography of Malcolm X. Today it was an English to Hebrew picture dictionary. Sophie's tastes are wide and varied.

So today we are laying on the alphabet carpet and she is opening flaps on a Bob the Builder book, minding our own business, when this weird little boy comes over and sits next to us. Now, believe me when I tell you that I don't use the word "weird" to describe many children, other than my own, of course. Children are by their very nature just a little bit off, and more power to them there. This kid, though: dude. It wasn't just the combination of his Hitler youth cheekbones and doll's eyes, Tom Cullen haircut (M-O-O-N spells "home schooled") and Village of the Damned thousand yard stare that raised the hairs up on the back of my neck. No, what really did it was his opening statement to the two of us:

"Casey's dead," he said, in a flat, monotone, Ediphone wax cylinder-sounding sort of way. "She's up in heaven, protected by angels."

Creepy number one.

Sophie doesn't even look up from her book at him. "She's buried under the window," she says.

Creepy number two.

She's going to end up being that kid nobody wants to sit next to in home room, right? Or the next David Blaine, which really is just as bad.

Haikus For Old Lovers #2

Did the class see us
coming out of the darkroom,
your shirt on backwards?

Haikus For Old Lovers #1

You loved Dick Van Dyke
a lot more than you loved me.
Nick at Nite sucks ass.

I Am a Whiny Plague Monkey

It started out pretty simple, this illness that has currently got me wanting to curl up under a blanket and not come out for a week. I assumed it was something that Sophie gave me, since generally when she gets ill, I get it too. And she was, in point of fact, ill on Saturday. Not terribly, just a little snotty and with a tiny bit of a fever, which is how my symptoms manifested, and so I wasn’t worried about it. Sunday however, about halfway through the day, I was very hot, very snotty, and very unhappy. Yesterday, that was absolutely fucking brutal. I knew I was doomed when I woke up in the morning and felt as though I had a flaming pineapple stuck in the middle of my throat. On top of that was the alternating freezing chills and sweat-drenched fever spells. The wracking cough was a good touch too, in a very “Victorian dying of tuberculosis” sort of way.

Lost: Spoiler Alert!

So it turns out the island was really just inside the snow globe of an autistic kid.

Well, at least that explains the polar bears.

Sometimes My Brain Doesn't Work

Sophie and I popped out to grab a take-and-bake pizza this afternoon not far from the house, maybe a fifteen minute drive. She likes it there, although she's not really a giant fan of pizza just yet. What she really likes is the pink lemonade they carry there, Tropicana in a plastic bottle (which means, I think, that's there isn't any actual lemon in the lemonade, but what sort of father would I be if I didn't start her on the road to poor eating choices this early in life?), which to me tastes like a bit of a combination of antifreeze, lost childhood and rodeo clown urine mixed in a lovely high fructose corn syrup base. Not my thing, but to each his or her own.

The wind was blowing like a motherfuck while we were heading back to the car, gusting to over 45 mph (I know, because I checked when we got home--go, go, Gadget Internet!), which meant that it was all I could do to prevent our pizza from turning into a flying saucer and taking off in an uncontrolled spin up, up and away. Getting it, the lemonade, the salad, the cookie dough ("Which only costs you an extra $.01 with the family-sized pizza and salad that you are already buying," upsold the woman behind the counter), Sophie and the stuffed red plush T-rex that she insisted be brought with us all into the car without disaster took talent, luck and a prayer to Cthulhu, but we pulled it off pretty smoothly. Or so I thought, until we were doing 70mph on the freeway and heading home.

"Daddy," Sophie said from her car seat in the back. "You forgot to buckle me in."

I thought a moment. Shit, she was right. "Well, can you buckle the top one for me, honey?" She's got a pair of buckles, one that goes over her chest and shoulders, one that goes over her waist. She's learned to put the top one on and off by herself, but she can't manage the lower one yet on her own. She needs to start working out, squeezing racquetballs an hour a day or something. She'll never get to that "Connie Chung cracking walnuts with her bare hands" thing if she doesn't get started on it now.

"Sometimes little kids can do the top one," she said.* "Sometimes grownups have to do the bottom one."

We made it home in one piece, but it made me remember how my mother and grandfather drove me across the country as a baby, back before child seats, before seat belt laws, hell, almost even before cars were required to have seat belts. I rode from east to west coasts in a wicker basket, wrapped in a blanket, all Moses-ed up, and nothing bad happened to me because of it.

Okay, we did hit a patch of ice in Kentucky or Tennessee or some Hazzard County place like that, and my grandfather did manage to roll us upside-down in a ditch, and it was only sheer luck that none of us was killed or severely injured in the accident, but c'mon! Whoever hasn't been in a near-fatal car accident, raise your hand.

That's what I thought.

But I do hope that the next time I forget to strap her in, Sophie tells me before we actually hit the freeway. I do sorta kinda like her and shit, so I'd like to keep her in one piece.

*Sophie's new thing is what I call the "sometimes little kids" observation, which goes a little something like this: "Sometimes little kids get books at the library." "Sometimes little kids eat candy for dinner." "Sometimes little kids flush toilet." "Sometimes little kids fall out of bed."

Sometimes Daddy thinks it's really cute.