Sometimes I wonder how much my kids are going to be influenced by the fact that their father is a semi-insane, ultra competive weirdo with a giant head. At times I think, blissfully, probably not too much, after all, they have their mother who is grounded, maddeningly reasonable, and has a normal sized head.
Other times, however, I can see a lot of me in them, especially my son. To wit, he is 4 years old, yet completely happy with watching an entire football or baseball game with me, all the while peppering me like a caesar salad with questions ranging from totally inane and pointless ("Dad, does the brown football team have 2 shoes?") to concise and well thought out, ("Dad, what happens if the pitcher throws a ball and the guy hits it and it bounces over the fence?")
His favorite question however, is always, "Dad, who are the bad guys?" He's determined to know who the bad guys are in any situation, so he can figure out who to cheer for, and against. This doesn't just apply to regular sporting events either. The other day we were watching an airplane race from Greece or someplace like that and he wanted to know.
Him: Dad, who are the bad guys?
Me: Ummmm, I don't know dude, this is an airplane race. I don't think there are bad guys.
Him: The red?
Me: Seriously, I don't know.
Him: The blue?
Me: Sure, the blue.
Him: No, the red.
Me: Ummm....
He also wants to know the bad guys when we are watching SportsCenter.
Him: Dad, who are the bad guys?
Me: Buddy, this is just a bunch of people talking about football. There aren't any bad guys.
Him: The guy in black?
Me: Miles???
So once he determines who the bad guys are in any situation (Football, Basketball, the VMA's) he begins vociferously rooting against them. This can be pretty funny when we are alone, but in a setting with others, it's a little embarrassing. We were at Farmington High's Homecoming football game, and near the end we were sitting with my wife's parents on the visitor side, because the home side was too packed to find seats. So then the visiting parents and fans got to enjoy a 4 year old obnoxiously, and loudly rooting for the other team.
Him (Really loudly): GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That was OK, a little gamesmanship never hurt anybody. But then one of the players on the other team suffered what appeared to be a pretty severe knee injury. Things got a little out of hand after that.
Him (Very loudly again): THE BAD GUY GOT AN OWWIE!!! YAY!!!!!
Us (In hushed tones): Miles, you can't cheer when somebody gets an owwie.
Him: Why not, he's the bad guy. GOOOOO TIGERS!!!!!
People turned around to frown at whoever was cheering a high school kid's injury, and saw my beautiful little boy. He frowned back at all of them, very defiantly. I figure that might be partially my doing. Oops.
Then there's the issue of strategy for winning, which he appears to be coming up with all on his own. I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but it's the type of strategy he's employing that has me a little concerned. I coached his and my daughter's soccer team this fall, and what I noticed was that in between coming up to me and making sure that his team had more goals than the "bad guys" i.e. a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds every 3 minutes or so, that he was also crashing into the other team's players and knocking them over an inordinate amount of times, enough so that it was raising eyebrows with the fans. After the game I said to him,
Me: You were really crashing into the other team a lot. What's the deal?
Him: I was bumping the bad guys so that our team would get the ball and win.
Me: Ummmm....
See, strategy. He was the wrecking ball, opening lanes for his teammates. I applaud the thought he put into that, he's only 4 after all, but I was a little concerned it might be, I don't know, blatant cheating.
Finally, there's this thing he does, around our house we refer to it as a "Gigantic Temper Tantrum", whenever it seems as though he's going to lose at something. I can't help but accept that this is my fault, you're looking at the guy who got kicked out of SS Billiards in Hopkins at the ripe old age of 5 for beating up the "Baby Pac-Man" machine because I thought the joystick wasn't functioning properly. Again, oops. Yesterday we were playing the Wii version of some really lame mini-golf game. My son lost to my daughter. What followed was an epic tantrum, which should really only be reserved for things like the End of the World, that lasted well into dinner, and including loud screaming, and trying to maim his sibling, and the dogs.
I'm not really lamenting about this, he's probably going to be a wonderful athlete, but it's just weird to see the traits your little ones pick up on. I'm resolving to kick garbage cans less this year during baseball season for this reason. Awww, who am I kidding?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Lost & Found
Did you ever stop and think about how much stuff you've lost in your lifetime, and then think in terms of monetary value how much all that stuff would be worth if you had it back? I think about that a lot, and it makes me really mad at myself. How could I have possibly been so careless as to lose all this stuff? Maybe some of it got stolen, but mostly I probably just left the stuff lying somewhere because I'm a careless idiot. Let's break down the list.
-99% of all pens I've ever owned
-60% of all CD's I've ever owned
-1 IPod
-20 pairs of sunglasses
-1 pair of shoes (Side note: When I was 12 and on vacation in San Francisco, my shoes mysteriously vanished, and to this day I have no idea what happened to them. I had only brought one pair also, so I had to wear bread bags on my feet to the airport. I felt like an orphan.)
-A plastic bag containing over 1000 dollars. (Side Note: I found this while floating down a river in Mexico, and I was so geeked about finding it that I forgot to put it in a safe place and it floated right out of my pocket)
-3 cement dildos
-The cassette tape that I drunkenly rapped at Funkytown Studios on
- 2 Wallets
-A trapeze
- A $25 Mystic Lake Casino Chip
-40 Pairs of underpants (Boxers and briefs, but not my snakeskin ballhuggers, thank goodness!!)
- 342 homework assignments (Grades 7-12)
-4 Turtles
-A Sword of Damocles
-404 Wiffle Balls
-2 Girlfriends
-1 cage to keep girlfriends in.
-1 cell phone
-1 baseball uniform (J Botten)
-A really rare Playboy with a nude pictorial featuring Martina Navratilova frenching Ellen DeGeneres.
-74 VHS videos, including 3 Caddyshacks.
-41 DVD's, including 3 Caddyshacks.
- A pair of Jeans that I really liked.
-My "Bad Ass" t-shirt that I made myself and wore to the bar once
-A Charleston Chew that Goose gave me
-A large vat of Meth
-Horse Testicles that I won at the Dakota County Fair
-A Rocket Ship
-The infamous "Will Watson Alaska Anchorage Basketball"
-The 1958 Cleveland Browns
-The Soundtrack to "Peter and the Wolf" hummed loudly by Elton John
-4 million buttons
- A bag of cat poop that we had planned on putting on an old lady's doorstep and then setting it on fire and then ringing the doorbell and when she ran out to stomp on the bag we would run in and lock the door, essentially stealing a house. A foolproof plan conjured up by 11 year olds, foiled because the cat poop bag went missing.
-4 gas caps
-A machine that could turn a normal person into an angry transvestite.
-A large hole in the earth (That's right, I lost a hole. Deal with it.)
-A foam rubber phallus, very handy for smashing people on the head with.
-One of those big foam hands, formed in the shape of "The Shocker"
-A fish hook that actively tried to hook itself into your fingers
and
-All of my baby teeth
That's a pretty long list of very valuable things. But while I was getting all angry, and pouting and swearing, and contemplating going gang raping alone, I realized that I have an equally large pile of things that I have no idea where they came from. I may have inherited them from the earth, like Johnny Appleseed, but more likely it's just mostly stuff my people left behind, and I was too lousy of a friend to ever tell them. This list includes
-74 Tapes and CD's
-42 shirts
- One fleece that did not fit, but I wore it anyway to justify having it.
- One of those bowling glove/carpal tunnel syndrome fixer hand things
-A beach towel previously owned by a professional hockey player
- A statue of Marge Schott
-Some strange medicine from China that makes you poop, pee, and hallucinate about large kittens all at the same time.
-One Moose
-A bunch of hamburger patties that wound up in my freezer.
-Skim cat milk.
-A false Declaration of Independence
-A rogue Tylenol PM that lived on my dorm room floor for months. We even vacuumed around it.
-A bunch of pubes (In a textbook I had in 9th grade)
-2 folding chairs
-A broken camera
-2 pairs of rusty nipple clamps
-A Garden Weasel
-Noseplugs
-A half used tube of Diaper Rash Ointment
-Kevin McHale
-Penis tweezers
-A bunch of useless self help books (Example: How to be Clinically Depressed and Still get the Morning Paper)
-3 different cement dildos
-22,000 rubber bands
-Everybody Poops on Audio book
-A Fernando Valenzuela rookie card, not autographed by me in a blatant attempt to fleece a childhood friend out of money
-Doyle Brunson's front teeth
-A large vial of Crack (or shaved peanuts)
-A small vial of liquid mercury
-The Zapruder Film
-A term paper that proves conclusively the amount of wood a woodchuck would chuck had he been willing and able to chuck the aforementioned wood.
-A zipper
-A bottle of Salmon flavored Whiskey
-A deck of naked lady playing cards that is all jokers and instruction cards
and
-A bottle of sunshine.
I figure I came out about even in this whole thing, so that made me feel a lot better.
-99% of all pens I've ever owned
-60% of all CD's I've ever owned
-1 IPod
-20 pairs of sunglasses
-1 pair of shoes (Side note: When I was 12 and on vacation in San Francisco, my shoes mysteriously vanished, and to this day I have no idea what happened to them. I had only brought one pair also, so I had to wear bread bags on my feet to the airport. I felt like an orphan.)
-A plastic bag containing over 1000 dollars. (Side Note: I found this while floating down a river in Mexico, and I was so geeked about finding it that I forgot to put it in a safe place and it floated right out of my pocket)
-3 cement dildos
-The cassette tape that I drunkenly rapped at Funkytown Studios on
- 2 Wallets
-A trapeze
- A $25 Mystic Lake Casino Chip
-40 Pairs of underpants (Boxers and briefs, but not my snakeskin ballhuggers, thank goodness!!)
- 342 homework assignments (Grades 7-12)
-4 Turtles
-A Sword of Damocles
-404 Wiffle Balls
-2 Girlfriends
-1 cage to keep girlfriends in.
-1 cell phone
-1 baseball uniform (J Botten)
-A really rare Playboy with a nude pictorial featuring Martina Navratilova frenching Ellen DeGeneres.
-74 VHS videos, including 3 Caddyshacks.
-41 DVD's, including 3 Caddyshacks.
- A pair of Jeans that I really liked.
-My "Bad Ass" t-shirt that I made myself and wore to the bar once
-A Charleston Chew that Goose gave me
-A large vat of Meth
-Horse Testicles that I won at the Dakota County Fair
-A Rocket Ship
-The infamous "Will Watson Alaska Anchorage Basketball"
-The 1958 Cleveland Browns
-The Soundtrack to "Peter and the Wolf" hummed loudly by Elton John
-4 million buttons
- A bag of cat poop that we had planned on putting on an old lady's doorstep and then setting it on fire and then ringing the doorbell and when she ran out to stomp on the bag we would run in and lock the door, essentially stealing a house. A foolproof plan conjured up by 11 year olds, foiled because the cat poop bag went missing.
-4 gas caps
-A machine that could turn a normal person into an angry transvestite.
-A large hole in the earth (That's right, I lost a hole. Deal with it.)
-A foam rubber phallus, very handy for smashing people on the head with.
-One of those big foam hands, formed in the shape of "The Shocker"
-A fish hook that actively tried to hook itself into your fingers
and
-All of my baby teeth
That's a pretty long list of very valuable things. But while I was getting all angry, and pouting and swearing, and contemplating going gang raping alone, I realized that I have an equally large pile of things that I have no idea where they came from. I may have inherited them from the earth, like Johnny Appleseed, but more likely it's just mostly stuff my people left behind, and I was too lousy of a friend to ever tell them. This list includes
-74 Tapes and CD's
-42 shirts
- One fleece that did not fit, but I wore it anyway to justify having it.
- One of those bowling glove/carpal tunnel syndrome fixer hand things
-A beach towel previously owned by a professional hockey player
- A statue of Marge Schott
-Some strange medicine from China that makes you poop, pee, and hallucinate about large kittens all at the same time.
-One Moose
-A bunch of hamburger patties that wound up in my freezer.
-Skim cat milk.
-A false Declaration of Independence
-A rogue Tylenol PM that lived on my dorm room floor for months. We even vacuumed around it.
-A bunch of pubes (In a textbook I had in 9th grade)
-2 folding chairs
-A broken camera
-2 pairs of rusty nipple clamps
-A Garden Weasel
-Noseplugs
-A half used tube of Diaper Rash Ointment
-Kevin McHale
-Penis tweezers
-A bunch of useless self help books (Example: How to be Clinically Depressed and Still get the Morning Paper)
-3 different cement dildos
-22,000 rubber bands
-Everybody Poops on Audio book
-A Fernando Valenzuela rookie card, not autographed by me in a blatant attempt to fleece a childhood friend out of money
-Doyle Brunson's front teeth
-A large vial of Crack (or shaved peanuts)
-A small vial of liquid mercury
-The Zapruder Film
-A term paper that proves conclusively the amount of wood a woodchuck would chuck had he been willing and able to chuck the aforementioned wood.
-A zipper
-A bottle of Salmon flavored Whiskey
-A deck of naked lady playing cards that is all jokers and instruction cards
and
-A bottle of sunshine.
I figure I came out about even in this whole thing, so that made me feel a lot better.
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