Exhibit F in the Divorce Proceeding

I am a baseball fan, and a relatively serious one at that. Of 162 Mets games every year, I figure to watch all or part of well over 100 of them. I feel happy when the Mets succeed; I ache when they struggle. I am in a baseball fantasy league and before I joined it, I still read the boxscores in the paper every morning.

I love, absolutely love going to the ballpark -- the sights, the sounds, the smells. And the only thing I love more than just going to the ballpark is going there with my kids. I'm not sure why I enjoy that experience so much...I don't have lots of memories of going to Mets games with my father. I do have very clear memories of watching games with him; when Dwight Gooden was a young phenom, electrifying Shea Stadium with his pitches, my father would keep a tally of Gooden's strikeouts on his own sheet of paper, as if Gooden's strikeout count wasn't a fact of constant discussion on the game broadcast. But that's what you do when you're excited about your team.

I have taken Max to a Mets game every year since he was born (except when he was 1 1/2; that year we just went to a Cyclones game), and Eliza joined us for the first time last summer. Max really likes going to baseball games, almost exclusively for the food. He likes the atmosphere, too -- cheering "Let's go Mets" and "every-body clap your hands," and he gets excited when a Mets player hits a home run and I point out to him the gigantic red "Big Apple" that emerges from an upside-down tophat beyond center field. But he's never given a rat's ass about the game itself. Whether at Shea, or sitting at home on the couch with me, whenever I've tried to explain what is going on he either tunes me out or tells me to stop talking. I figured that he'd eventually come around.

Who knew that a book about a team of monkeys losing a hotly-contested baseball game to a team of hippos would facilitate his eventual interest in the rules of baseball, but he wasn't understanding certain references in the book and he was demanding answers. Last night I started explaining some of the basics as we read the book. Tonight Cathleen read it to him and he again was asking questions. I grabbed a handful of small Shrek and Star Wars action figures and set up a mock baseball infield with boardbooks as the bases (1st base had to be replaced after Eliza took interest with our choice).

I started to explain how the pitcher (dragon) throws the ball into the hitter (blind mouse); if the outfielder (donkey) catches the hit on the fly, the hitter is out and sits. But if the ball gets through or drops through, it's a hit, and the hitter goes to 1st base or perhaps farther. I then played through a series of hitters (gingerbread man, Han Solo, some Shrek character I couldn't identify) getting consecutive hits, leading up to the point where one of them was finally forced home.

As I showed Max the blind mouse crossing home plate, I stated "and then this guy..." when suddenly Cathleen, who had been relatively quiet and deferential during my tutorial, jumps up and exclaims "hits a home run and the apple comes out of the hat!" Max jumps up in responsive joy. Cathleen shouts "home run! home run!" Max jumps up and down shouting "home run! home run!" Eliza is also jumping up and down.

I am staring in utter disbelief. Are you shitting me, Cathleen?

I started shouting, "no, no, it's not a home run, it's just a run." But Max would hear nothing of it. He even accused me of being a liar at that point. Lesson ended. Baseball knowledge warped.

Surpriseless

Late this afternoon our doorbell rings. Because our intercom is broken, these days I hit the buzzer to enable the front door to open, and then I walk out of my apartment to see who is entering our building. Nine times out of ten it is a package courier who shouts up hello and places a package on the bureau we have in the downstairs hallway (unless, of course, they need a signature). So imagine my surprise, today, when the guy carrying the package into my building was not only not wearing a uniform, but he came bolting up the stairs to meet me.

Holding out a small-ish Amazon.com box, he starts rambling, "I live next door and we got this package and since my mom's name is Cathleen I didn't even look at it carefully and just opened it, but then I realized it wasn't meant for me, and so I'm sorry that the box is opened but it's a Garmin sportswatch and it's all in there."

I looked at him, blankly.

He extended his hand, "I'm Justin." I think he said Justin. He just ruined the surprise of the birthday gift that Cathleen got for me; why the fuck should I care what his name is? As he descended back down the stairs, he apologized again for opening the box, and then added an enthusiastic, "enjoy that Garmin sportswatch!"

This is December, right? Justin might not have known that it's my birthday in five days, but it's my impression that lots of people are ordering gifts for other people for other reasons at this time of year. I kind of wish he had taken that into consideration before ruining the surprise.

Not that anything was truly ruined for me. Most of the enjoyment of the actual surprise is all for the surprisor. Hell, I'm gonna be really psyched to have that Garmin watch whether I know about it now or first learned about it five days from now. But Cathleen has been robbed of the joy of watching me unwrap and discover the cool, thoughtful gift. Stupid Justin.

Intimate moment

Hey blog, I miss you.

I miss you, too, rick.

After Thanksgiving. I'll be back. I promise.

Sweet.

Poop Game Revisited

Cathleen and I were chatting in the kitchen this evening, when we looked over and witnessed the kids playing the following game:

Max was laying on the floor, and Eliza would walk over and step on him, at which point he would yell out, "you stepped in poop!" and they would collapse into each other, laughing hysterically, before repeating the entire scene again.

I mean, even if we were to magically find a way to completely housebreak our dogs, it is just too damn late. Our kids are indelibly warped.

There can be little doubt now, right?

I mean, you have to be a true believer at this point, one with unshakable faith in the greater power, to deny that capitalism is a complete failure. After years and years of deregulation, what do we get -- the greatest financial catastrophe since the catastrophe in the 30s that prompted us to start regulating the banks in the first place. You don't have to get caught up in the fact that capitalism inevitably creates class divisions, concentrations of wealth and deprivations of wealth, winners and losers. Shit, we've known that for years and are little bothered by it. But with every capitalist on Wall Street running to the government for help right now, and only the monied reactionaries in Congress adamantly holding out for a market correction (i.e., grand-scale suffering for those who do not have money or are about to lose it all), there can be no doubt now. Capitalism is a failure, and the only way that we can continue with our capitalist system is by propping it up, again, with government intervention.

Anybody feel like whipping out the "socialism" card in our next discussion about universal healthcare?

What a fungi am I

It has been a bizarre six weeks for this guy's body. At the end of July I wound up with ringworm all over my torso. Ringworm, for the uninitiated, is the most misappropriately named medical condition out there. Worm? Not at all. It's actually a skin fungus -- the tinea fungus, to be exact. If you get the tinea fungus on your feet, it's called athlete's foot. If you get the tinea fungus on your crotch, it's call jock itch. Anywhere else and it's called ringworm. Granted, it does end up forming a ring-like patch on your skin that itches a little, but the very name ringworm makes it that much skeevier an experience.

It turns out that ringworm is wickedly contagious, and you can spread it all over yourself by scratching it (which I wasn't doing) or by something as innocuous as rubbing a towel on your body to dry yourself off after a shower. By the time I had figured out what was going on, I had it all over my stomach and back. Fortunately, they do amazing things with topical ointments these days, and within a couple of weeks it was gone.

Then, about a month later, I woke up with an earache. It was pretty severe, so I made an appointment to see my doctor the next day. He looked in my ear, declared it an ear infection and put me on antibiotics for ten days. Of course, I hadn't had any congestion leading up to the ear infection (or any other typical cause), so my doctor told me that if it hadn't cleared up within a week to call him. Well, I saw marginal progress at best by week's end. Although the ache had subsided from "chronic" to only "most of the time," my head felt like someone had pounded my left ear full of clay. I was half deaf and felt like I wanted to clear my ear out with an awl. I called my doctor, and he referred me to an otologist (ear specialist).

The ear guy peeked into my ear and said "antibiotics aren't going to take care of that." Turns out that I have, you guessed it, a fungal infection. This one is called aspergillus, and is treated with the same stuff you put on the ringworm, except in eardrop form. One week of the drops later, and the fungus is almost entirely gone.

A couple of thoughts, of course, come to mind. Ahem, why the hell am I suddenly so vulnerable to every little fungus? According to the doctor, and based on my own obsessive online research, it's just one of those things that happens.

And it's bad enough to get ringworm, but a fungus in the ear? The ear? I basically had the equivalent of a yeast infection in my ear. I mean, if that's not some sort of bizarre twist on a Nantucketian limerick. I have no idea what to expect next.

The Hiatus is Over

So I haven't posted a blog in almost two months. Does that make me a bad blogger? Perhaps.

I've been busy...vacation in Canada, sleep-depriving Olympics-watching addiction, unhealthy Democratic National Convention watching, swamped at work, etc., etc. Sure, there was plenty to blog about. Hell, rarely a day went by where I didn't think that X or Y would be good blog fodder, but then I'd find myself waking up the next morning, postless.

But it is time to move on. Last week marked the one year anniversary of this blog, and damn if I don't feel a year older for it.