Law and Disorder

You’re going to spend a lot of time investigating the criminal activities of your children. Crimes such as The Peanut Butter and Barbie Sandwich Affair and the string of compact disc thefts from late 2003 still haunt our tiny house. And residents still whisper and lower their eyes when speaking about Crayongate. Yes, life with young children will often present you with mysteries which are difficult to solve for a variety of reasons, including uncooperative witnesses (the kids), inept law enforcement (the dog), and corrupt judicial officials (that would be me – I’ve been known to sink pretty low to get results. The Snickers Bar bribery scandal comes to mind).

My most recent investigation involved the dining room table, something sharp and one of the children’s names. I was setting the plates around the table – a job normally reserved for the children, but for some reason I was doing it myself – when I noticed one of the children’s name was carved into the table in letters about half in inch high. A rookie investigator would have been tempted to immediately call the usual suspects into the room and immediately begin interrogating until he had answers. But I have been at this game too long to dive into interrogations without a little preparation. Plus, I had a Thai coconut squash soup on the stove and it needed to be stirred or else it would get all lumpy on the bottom and nobody wants that. Not to mention the cheddar crisps I had toasting in the oven. No, I would need to prepare myself for what was sure to be a test of cunning and intelligence. Would I be able to outwit a three year old and her four brothers and sisters? Only time would tell.

The first thing I did was set a plate over the evidence. That way anyone who may want to glance over at their handy-work would spend a little more time gawking around as they tried to find the carving. Criminals almost always return to the scene of the crime – they like to rub our noses in it. Also, it was dinner time, so the criminal was forced to return to the scene of the crime, but never mind that. As the children ate dinner, they all looked fairly shifty to me – probably because they had all been up to something or other, but this was the only crime I had proof had taken place. Since no one spent and inordinate amount of time trying to look at the table, I moved on to the second phase of the investigation: casually buttering them up.

Not, you know, putting butter on them – I can see why, since this was at the dinner table, you might be confused by the term “buttering up,” but it just means to build up their confidence and lower their defenses. We haven’t had to actually apply dairy products to a child since the Skunk Taunting Milk Bath of 2001.

“So, how was everyone’s day,” I asked. I watched carefully to see who looked away. All of them did. Then they ignored me completely – this didn’t surprise me, as they were merely following Kid Law, which clearly states that unless an adult as you, specifically, a very specific question about your day, you must not answer that question. Group questions were right out. If I ask a specific kid, “How was your day?” I can expect that he will answer, “Fine.” He’ll give that answer even if his school day was marred by a terrorist in the cafeteria. Had there actually been a terrorist attack on the school, I would only be able to get that information from him by asking very detailed, very specific questions.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Did you do anything fun? Did you learn anything?”

“I guess.”

“Did anything exciting happen today?”

“No.”

“Did anyone try to detonate a dirty bomb during lunch?”

“Yes.”


I move on to asking each child specific questions, but I stay away from tipping my hand too early. I am tempted to ask Achilles when was the last time he had seen his pocket knife, just to see the reaction of the table, but I bite my tongue – seriously, I bit my tongue eating a piece of pecan pie we had for dessert and my investigation stalled.

While we were clearing the table, I had my accomplice, Junior Detective Stacy, pretend to find the carving. I then called all the children into the room and swung my investigation into high gear. I put them at the end of the table like a police line-up and I launched into my speech.

“Someone has been playing games. Someone has been destructive. Someone has decided the rules just don’t apply.”

Five blank faces.

“I want you all to take a look at the table – right there at the end. What do you see?”

Five blank faces.

“Well, what do you see?”

“Wood,” says Suspect One.

“The table,” says Suspect Two.

“A wooden table,” says Suspect Three.

Suspect Four has forgotten the question.

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five. I know from experience that what Suspect Five, being three years old, wants to tell me is, “I love you,” because that is what she always says when she senses tension. I don’t suck for her tricks.

“Does anyone notice the name carved into the table?”

Five blank faces.

I change the question. “There is a name carved into the table – whose name is it?”

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five.

“It says, ‘Queen Mab,’” says Suspect Two.

“That’s true, it does,” says Suspect Four.

“I see wood,” says Suspect Three.

“That’s not how I spell my name,” says Suspect One.

And it was true. Despite the fact the Queen Mab’s name was the one carved into the table, I had already pretty much decided she was probably not the culprit, given that her sixth grade education would almost have certainly allowed her to spell Queen Mab without using a K. Suspects Two, Three and Four all turned to look at Suspect Five, as if I might buy the fact that the three year old had carved the name in the table. I wasn’t ready to totally eliminate anyone as a suspect just yet, so but I decided the focus of my attention should probably go elsewhere.

“You know what I think,” I asked Two, Three and Four? “I think it was one of you three.”

“It could have been one of use,” said Two, “But have you considered the fact that it may have been Queen Mab trying to get one of us in trouble?” Two is the junior lawyer in the family and often tries to argue himself out of trouble based on semantic technicalities – his win to loss ratio is atrocious, but he tries hard. In this case, he didn’t think this was an absurd idea at all. Truth be told, I had briefly considered this scenario already, but Suspect One didn’t fit that profile. If she had an axe to grind with one of the other children, she would hit them with it – that’s her profile. Suspect Two sensed I wasn’t believing this, so he shut up. A wise move.

Suspect Two does, in fact, own a pocket knife, so he was pretty high on the list, until I remembered that he had been at a friend’s house all afternoon, which was the time frame forensics had given me for when this crime took place. That left only Suspect Three and Suspect Four. They both looked guilty to me, so I just stared and waited.

“Can I speak to my lawyer?” Three asked.

“Mom is working on the dishes,” I replied. “If you cooperate I can make sure things go smoothly
for you on the upcoming Hidden Candy Bar Wrappers In The Bedroom Case.”

Suspect Three mulled this over for a moment, looked up at the ceiling, down at her shoes and said, “I ain’t no rat.”

Which, actually, she was, since she was pretty clearly indicating that it wasn’t her, which only left one suspect – Number Four. I pulled the hanging dining room light over the top of Number Four’s head.

“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” I told him.

In retrospect, I probably should have cuffed him immediately, because I left the room to refill my coffee mug and he fled through an open window. After a short bicycle chase which ended in a fiery crash on a neighbor’s lawn and a foot race across the park, I once again had the suspect in custody. You can catch the whole thing on COPS this Saturday night.

A Word About Trophies

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I want to talk for a minute about trophies and why, exactly, it is that kids even play sports. As a psychology major, I greatly enjoy dissecting and analyzing why people – kids included – do what they do. Sometimes I am completely unable to understand a person’s motivation for a specific act and sometimes I think I understand, but I am waaaay off. Like the time I claimed that Jennifer Aniston was such a bad actress because she was signaling to me through the television. I have since discovered (and I discovered this before the retraining order, so I was not in violation) that this was not actually the case – she merely has bad timing. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I was not attacking her – I was merely trying to get close enough to explain that I am already married and I cannot possibly have the kind of relationship with her that she is asking for. So, sometimes I’m wrong.

But, I feel fairly confident in saying that the reason kids play sports is not to get a trophy at the end of the year. Although it is just my opinion, I believe there could be no trophies given to each team member at the end of a season and it wouldn’t increase or decrease the number of kids participating in each sport. For those of you who are reading this in preparation for your child’s first season of organized athletics, let me fill you in on what the heck I’m talking about.

At the end of every sports season your child will receive a trophy. Nothing terribly elaborate – maybe a little six inch high job with a baseball player or a soccer player or what have you. The name plate generally won’t be personalized but will list the year and sport played. And Junior is going to get one of these every single season. Every season.

The reason I comment on this is because this is Not How It Was When I Was A Kid. Now, as I have mentioned, I was a pretty good athlete. Captain of two teams, winner of three state championships – have I mentioned it? Anyway, I mention it here to point out that I was not a bookworm who never participated in sports (a fact which can be verified with my old report cards) – I played three sports a year from the time I was in second grade through high school. And I was 14 years old before I received my first trophy.

Ah, I remember it well – Coach Page’s summer basketball camp. I received a Player of the Week trophy – the smallest trophy I ever got, I think. A little granite base holding a gold basketball player shooting the most awkward one handed shot imaginable (I think Coach Page had this designed especially for me). I remember the incredible amount of work it took to earn that trophy – how much extra hustle I had to put in, how much sweat and effort. I earned that trophy and no one else. The other players could have earned it, but it was me who beat them out – for that week, I was the star.

I had to ride my bike home with one hand to carry the glorious monument to my hard work and effort and I intentionally rode through town so that anyone who happened to see me would know that I – Aaron Bradbury – had won a trophy. During the next four years I received probably half a dozen individual trophies and they were all great, but the feeling I had from winning that first trophy was amazing. It was a beautiful thing and I can honestly say it was one of the prouder moments of my life.

Kids These Days don’t get to experience that feeling. And I don’t say that to be the crotchety old guy who thinks everything was better when he was young. As a child of the 70s and 80s, I can say with great confidence that everything was definitely not better when I was young. For proof positive, I give you disco and the Police Academy movies. I say kids don’t get that feeling because these days kids get trophies for every sport they play; therefore, it is impossible that they are getting any sort of a rush out of receiving one. After all, if you play Little League, you get a trophy, regardless of whether you were good, bad or even owned a glove. You can be the worst damned player in the history of the sport and still get a trophy. You can show up for half the games and play like a monkey humping a football during the other half and it doesn’t matter – you still get the trophy.

I’m sure this all started as a misguided effort to boost all the kids’ confidence and make everyone feel like they were a valuable part of the team. I’m sure that the same type of adults who decided every player needs a trophy were the same group that decided we shouldn’t keep score during soccer games - misguided individuals who either don’t have kids of their own or never talk to them if they do. These are the kind of adults who think kids are too stupid to keep track of the score on their own. I have news for you – the only people not keeping score are the adults. Every kid on the soccer field knows the score. Do these people really think kids can’t keep track of a game that is going to have a final score of 2 to 1? Or in the case of some of my teams, 10 to 1?

Trophies are the same kind of thing. When a kid gets a trophy at the end of the season he isn’t fooled into thinking he was instrumental to the team if his biggest contribution was accidentally tripping an opposing player on the sideline. He can see all the other members of the team getting the trophies, too. It’s not rocket science to understand that every player getting a trophy means the trophy is worthless.

To be honest, I blame my parents’ generation for starting this. When I was a kid our school held an annual field day – kind of a mini-Olympics where we did all the run and jump track and field events. At the end of the day, the first second and third place finishers for each event at each grade level were given a blue, red or white ribbon denoting their accomplishment. And anyone to uncoordinated to get a real ribbon was given a green “nice try” ribbon that my brothers and sister used to refer to as a “loser identification badge.” I never understood the concept. By sticking a green ribbon on these kids, it just advertised to the whole world that they didn’t win a damn thing that day – that just seems cruel to me. After all, if they were wearing no ribbon at all maybe other kids would just think they won a real ribbon and had decided not to wear it. Of course, that is probably also wishful thinking, because Poindexter probably wasn’t going to fool anyone into thinking he actually placed in an event – everyone has seen him during dodgeball in gym class and it would be pretty unlikely that he was anything other than entertaining during a footrace.

But you know what? Poindexter had every other day of school to shine – he got straight As and never once got yelled at for wiping boogers on the pigtails of the girl in front of him. Field day was the one day of the year where a guy like me could shine, so why give the losers ribbons, too? No teacher ever thought to give me a B just because all the other kids got an A and I shouldn’t feel left out. Shouldn’t the message be that everyone is different and some people are good at the long jump and some people understand what the quadratic equation is – it doesn’t make one person better than the other (although, statistically speaking, it makes one kid more likely to go to MIT and then make tons of dough upon graduation).

Again, my guess is that this all started as a misguided attempt to make kids who didn’t do so well feel as good as the kids that did, but it misses the mark. It’s patronizing and the kids know it. Unfortunately, there is not much to be done now – I’m not about to be the guy who crusades for taking trophies away from kids. The damage is done and the only thing left to do is make the best of a bad situation. That’s where my plan comes in.

Instead of having a banquet or cookout to give out the trophies to everyone, the coach needs to visit each player’s house individually and present the trophy to the kid in private, telling him that nobody else got a one, but that he deserved a trophy. Tell him it has to be kept secret because, well, I don’t know – make something up. The trophy is a matter of national security and must be kept in a safe and completely hidden place such as the back of the closet.
I’m not sure that kids will buy this, but it can’t be any worse than what we do now.

What the hell is this thing called spare time?

The following is an excerpt from my new book about children's activities - I'm about 1/4 of the way through so far. This is first draft material, so don't let typos and nonsensical sentences bog you down.

From the section dealing with youth sports:


What kind of coach are you?

I ask what kind of coach you are because you will coach. Seriously. The league will ask you and you will say yes because you don’t have any will power when it comes to things like that. Actually, this applies to every activity your children have – the organizers will ask and you will say yes. It’s as much a rule of nature as survival of the fittest or that lottery winners will find a way to become poor again. When you sign Junior up for Little League, they will ask you to coach and you’ll cave like a Kentucky coal mine.

The most important thing to do is categorize yourself as a coach. If the internet has taught us one thing it is that there is a lot of pornography out there. A lot. Like, so much that it is amazing that you have to start asking yourself, where are all these naked women coming from? Statistically, we must be getting to the point where some of these women are going to be from my own neighborhood and I’ll start to recognize them at the supermarket, picking up the kids from school, etc. I’ll wander up and say, “Don’t I recognize you from somewhere?” And the woman will answer, “You may have seen some of my work at HornyMomsAreWaitingForYouSeriouslyWe’reTotallyNotEvenKidding.com.” I won’t know what to say next and I’ll probably be embarrassed and walk away which works out well since Stacy probably won’t be too keen on me talking to amateur porn stars anyway.

But if the internet has taught us anything else, it is that humans fit neatly into different categories and those categories can be easily defined by taking a simple, 30 question true or false quiz where you are not given the option of answering “I don’t know” or “Maybe.” I enjoy being alone more than I enjoy being with people – true or false. No ambiguity allowed – you’re either a Unabomberesque hermit who hates people or a Paris Hilton-like attention seeker who will die unless you are the focus of at least a roomful of people.

A quick search for “personality quiz” on Google.com (Google.com: Making meaningful research totally antiquated and irrelevant) shows a total of 2,200,000 different hits. Among these two million plus sites designed to help quantify (does that word work here?) yourself, you can use short quizzes to determine your Simpsons personality, your Harry Potter personality, your Lover personality and your Personality personality. You can take the Free Five Minute Personality Quiz, the World’s Shortest Personality Test (and, one assumes, with a little digging the two million sites, the World’s Longest Personality Test), The Church of Scientology Personality Test and the What Poetry Form Am I? Personality Test.

All of these personality quizzes give you neat little answers to let you know who you are – like a lifelong quest for self-awareness, except you can do it on company time without leaving your chair. After you take the test, you will be lumped into one of – usually – between 5 and 10 categories. Sometimes the answers suck and they just tell you who you are, which isn’t much help.

You are Dr. Julius Hibbert.

Sometimes they have semi-helpful explanation of what your personality is all about, so you can begin planning your life around whatever foolish category you have landed in.

Short, terse, unfriendly,
Yet sometimes quite emotive;
I am the Haiku.

And, of course the best tests give you famous people who also fit your personality.

Some Famous ENFJs:
David, King Of Israel
President Abraham Linclon
Randy Quaid of Bye-bye Love and Moving
Oprah

Which then leaves you wondering when the hell David, King of Israel and President Lincoln had time to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, but you try not to let that bother you, as you have Oprah and randy Quaid in your lifeboat, too.

The point is, everyone is quantifiable and fits neatly into some category. Coaches are no exception. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find any tests designed to tell you what Coaching Personality you are (I mean, they probably exist somewhere in the 2 millions Google hits, but I lost interest in searching), so I decided to create one on my own. Then I discovered how much work it really is (hint: just enough to keep me from completing it) and I decided to just give you the answers and let you make up your own mind which coach you are based on the examples you have seen. Or don’t – lie to yourself if you want. It won’t bother me.

The Coaching Types

Clueless: Clueless can’t believe he got roped into coaching a sports team. The closest he’s ever been to a sporting event was when the Star Trek convention was held across the street from Fenway Park. Everyone knows Clueless has no idea how to play the game, but by the time the season starts they are so desperate for coaches they’d take anyone with a pulse – or even a guy without a pulse if they could get Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman to drag him around the field.

Because Clueless has spent his entire life being such a non-athletic nerd, he will have developed the condescending notion that there is nothing more to sports than brute strength. Therefore, when he finds out he will be coaching, he mistakenly believes that he can Google “soccer” or “basketball” and find out everything he needs to know about the game in 15 minutes. Thus, when he shows up for the first practice, he may have some vague idea how the game is played, but he quickly discovered that every sport has approximately six trillion subtleties built into it that take years to figure out. For instance, if he is coaching Little League, it will be at the first practice that he discovers he has no idea which is left field and which is right field. I know, athletes reading this are saying, “Right field is to the right, Poindexter.” Ah, but the right in relation to what? The fence? Home plate? I only bring this up because one of my children had a coach that asked this very question not once, but twice last year.

Clueless has two bits of good news coming to him, though. First, there will be no shortage of parents who do know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to scream it from the stands. My advice is to pretend you don’t hear the shouts – don’t even acknowledge that someone is yelling at you, even if it is over the fence from four feet away. Wait thirty seconds, then do exactly what the yelling parent said to do. The delay will serve to piss off the moron who doesn’t understand he is watching 7 year old play basketball and no amount of incorrect coaching (or correct coaching, for that matter) will effect the score a noticeable amount. Also, the delay will give the impression that whatever you were doing wrong was completely planned and on purpose. Of course you knew you only had three players on the court – it’s all part of The Plan. But now that you’ve bewildered the other team, maybe you’ll go ahead and slide those last two players out onto the court.

The second piece of good news for Clueless is that his job is completely safe. No matter how many fans and parents are screaming for his head and no matter how many times he forgets the rules of the game and no matter how badly the other team is destroying his team, he will make it through the season without being replaced. Why? Because if they could have filled the position with someone more competent than him they would have done so at the beginning of the season.

How to tell if you are Clueless: This is very simple. Ask yourself the following questions. 1. True or false: When I found out I was going to coach the team, I went out and purchased a whistle and an outfit suited to the particular sport I am coaching. 2. True or false: I researched the sport before the season.

If you answered true to either question, you are Clueless. Good luck – you’re going to need it. Of course, Win At All Costs will also answer true to both of those questions, but he won’t have been wondering whether or not he is Clueless. He’ll be sure, for reasons which will be apparent, that he knows his sport.

Season Prediction: 0 - 10 (that’s no wins and ten losses, Clueless). Unless another team fails to show up and is forced to forfeit. But, there is a chance that Clueless could lose even that game. On the plus side, Clueless won’t care, because even at the end of the season he’ll still be under the impression that it isn’t about winning or losing.

Win At All Costs: Most everyone will hate Win At All Costs – the parents, the players, the refs, the league, his own kids. He will be universally despised and talked about like he is a lower life form (Which he is. Which explains why he has the ability and time to become so invested in a youth sports league).

The most interesting aspect of Win At All Costs is that he is the only category of coach that may not have children of his own on the team. Sometimes he actually has a kid on the team. Sometimes he kid will be on the team in a few years and he’s building a team in the meantime. Sometimes he won’t even be married and will have no children of his own, which means he’s either a Pervert or he is such a moron he thinks coaching a Little League team is his first step toward being picked up as the manager of the Red Sox. If you are a parent of a child on the team, pray he’s a pervert – he’ll do less damage to your child’s psyche.

Like Clueless, Win At All Costs has done research to prepare for the season; however, Win At All Costs didn’t Google “soccer” and call it good. No, he spent weeks watching World Cup video, a month breaking down an offensive play called “Walking The Line” and at least half a year researching obscure rules such as 501.8c – “A player wearing green socks may obstruct the ball out of bounds only if the opposing team maintains a three goal lead (I made that up, Clueless, so just ignore it).” And then he’ll find a way to use it during a game that season. Interestingly enough, Win At All Costs can remember every rule in the book, but he can’t remember the PIN for his debit card without writing it down – but he “cleverly” writes it backwards on the protective envelope so no one will ever figure it out. This pretty much sums up Win At All Costs’ life and why he’s living in a van down by the river and eating cardboard for dinner.

Without sports, Win At All Costs would probably be in prison (in fact, he may have done that, too). Unable to relate to people on a normal level, he talks in sports analogies with everything he does. He talks about hustle and spirit and grit. He’ll bluntly inform you that your kid isn’t playing because he sucks and has no coordination. He’ll bench his own kid for two games because of a fielding error. He’ll make a star athlete wonder if it’s all worth it. He’ll make a spastic nerd kid want to quit during the first 15 minutes of practice. By the time the season is over, the parents won’t know whether to lynch him or chip in and buy him a present.

Win At All Costs isn’t all bad – he will win games. In fact, should he ever lose a game the players will be so traumatized after his tirade that the lesser players will quit en masse. He’ll scream and spit and froth and tell the players they play like little girls (even if they are little girls, which will still be an insult for some reason). He’ll hold double session practices for the next week and pretty much make everyone’s life a living hell until the team they play next has been absolutely humiliated in a crushing defeat. And even them he will wake with cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking about the one game they lost. Anything less than absolute perfection will not be tolerated.

When I said he isn’t all bad, I guess I mean if you are just like him you may not think he’s all bad.


Season Prediction: 9 – 1 if he has a bunch of no talent hacks on the team – undefeated if he is lucky enough to have a few quality players.


The Pervert: Fortunately, the Pervert is much less common today than he was years ago. Today sports organizations generally have the good sense to run background checks on the coaches, so at least all the pervs who have been arrested are weeded out. Remember back in the early nineties how you would constantly see news articles about how Mr. So and So who had coached Little League and was a Scoutmaster for 37 years was discovered to have been arrested 17 times for distribution of child pornography? Background checks have eliminated that sort of thing, so now you know that if the coach is The Pervert, he’s been hiding it pretty well.

Of course, the Pervert is still easy to spot – he’s the coach that’s waaaay too interested in the kids and never seems to even be aware that there is a game happening. 90% of the time he’ll have an arm around one of the kids, giving them a “pep talk” and completely creeping them out.

Unfortunately, because all the pervs who have prior arrest records have been weeded out, what we are left with is, essentially, the competent pervs who know how to hide it well. So, be careful, as the Pervert has been known to disguise himself as Clueless, Too Good To Be True and Mr. Laid Back. As a general rule, you won’t find him masquerading as Win At All Costs or The Screamer since he won’t want to make the kids afraid of him.

Season Prediction: No record – parents will quickly start pulling their kids when he is discovered to be a big perv.


The Screamer: During the first game, most people will incorrectly identify the Screamer as Win At All Costs. After all, he yells, he freaks out at the smallest things – sometimes getting in a lather over what appears to be nothing at all. Parents figure he must be Win At All Costs, right? It’s only when the team falls to 1 – 3 that everyone realizes the coach is actually The Screamer – mostly hot air.

The Screamer may sound like Win At All Costs, but he actually has a knowledge base of his sport more along the line of Clueless. The Screamer believes that the best way to mask his total incompetence is to simply yell at everyone he sees. Kids can’t hit the ball today? A good tongue lashing ought to motivate them. Other team seems to be scoring at will? A good old fashioned tirade, complete with throwing equipment should do the trick. Sometimes the Screamer resembles the Tasmanian Devil as he flails around and kicks at dirt.

The child athletes aren’t the only people to get yelled at – the Screamer has no problem bombing targets of opportunity as they arise. The more people he screams at, the better job he must be doing. Parents who bring their children late to practice often find themselves on the receiving end of the Screamer’s invective. Umpires and referees will be completely bewildered by the Screamer as he disputes calls which went his team’s way. Nobody will be able to figure out why he yelled at the concession stand attendant.

There are other ways a coach can become The Screamer. In the old days, the Screamer might have been Drunk Coach – the kind of guy who could coach Little League because he didn’t have a day job. These days it seems parents have decided to reconsider the wisdom of dropping a kid off at practice with a guy drinking tall boys at 3:15 on a Tuesday. Drunk Coach usually didn’t care too much what happened on the field, so long as he greatly inconvenienced by the game, i.e., he runs out of beer before the sixth inning. However, now that Drunk Coach is no longer socially acceptable – in as much as he was ever socially acceptable – he usually ends up becoming the Screamer as he finds his tolerance for young children to be much lower when he has to wait until 5:00 pm for his first drink. He may or may not understand the rules of the game and how to play, but none of that really matters as he’s still seeing double from the bender the night before. He finds the easiest thing to do is just yell at someone every so often.

Season Prediction: 6 – 4. The Screamer’s team wins a surprising amount of the time, given that he isn’t really coaching. Fear, it turns out, will motivate many of the players to actually try harder in a vain attempt to avoid becoming the object of a full-blown rage. If the little boogers were smart enough to figure out that there is no way to avoid the Screamer’s fits, they’d all quit – fortunately for the Screamer, they never figure that out.


My Kid Plays: There is an unwritten rule of kids’ sports: If you are willing to devote the time and energy to being the coach of the team, you have earned the right to play your kid slightly more than the other kids/more than he deserves. Sure, once in a while you’ll hear The Complainer (a sports parent type) whine about how his kid should bat lead off because he has a higher OBP than the coach’s kid, but any reasonable parent who thinks about it for a moment will agree that the coach’s kid should get more playing time as a thanks that you didn’t have to coach. There aren’t too many perks to coaching the Under 8 St. Mary’s Basketball Team, so rational people should begrudge the coach’s kid extra playing time even if he has the coordination of a newborn fawn.

My Kid Plays, however, misses the point and clearly has chosen to coach for the sole purpose of making sure his kid plays every second of every game, even if the kid hate’s the sport. At first, it may My Kid Plays is making the reasonable choice to bat his kid lead off every game – but when he decides to bat him every other man, people start to notice. My Kid Plays will always put his kid at pitcher, even if the kid throws like a right handed girl throwing left handed (Whoah! Put away the pitch forks and torches – I have a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why “throwing like a girl” is a valid description which does not warrant a lynching of the person who uttered it – watch for it later). My Kid Plays is operating under one of two assumptions: either he has totally fooled himself into believing his kid is the next Michael Jordan, or he believes playing as much and as often as possible will transform the kid into the next Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the matter is that the kid is usually mediocre to terrible and generally couldn’t care less if he played or sat the bench.

My Kid Plays is often an ex-athlete himself who dreams of glory for his spawn – he should read my notice to new fathers at the beginning of this section and just stop.

Season Prediction: 7 – 3. Then they lose the first round of the playoffs because My Kid Plays decides his kid should start at center against an opposing center a foot taller.

Other Minor Coaching Types

Mr. Laid Back: Easy to spot in his Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Mr. Laid Back is just there to get the job done. Usually Mr. Laid Back has a relatively respectable knowledge of the game and its rules – he just doesn’t care. The upside is, all the kids will play the same amount. The downside is that all the kids will play the same amount.
Season Prediction: 5 –5

Too Good To Be True: Maybe he is more coach than you deserve, maybe he’s pervert in disguise, but the one thing that is certain about Too Good To Be True is that he will make you feel totally inadequate as a parent when you discover that he coaches the team, volunteers down at the senior center, reads to the kids and tucks them in bed at night and still manages to hold a job earning $150k a year.
Season Prediction: 8 – 2. The kids will do well, but he doesn’t demand perfection. Go ahead – hate him for being perfect. Everyone else does.

So there you have seven basic types of coach. Feel free to pick a style for yourself, but be sure to dress it up a bit and make it your own. If you want to be the Screamer, carry a machete just for the reactions it will get. If you’re going to be the Pervert, be the best pervert you can be – carry good quality candy not American chocolate to lure children behind the dugout.

Remember, choose something you’ll be comfortable with because you’re going to have this personality as long as your kid is a kid. Why? Because only thing you can be sure of than being asked to coach is that if you say yes once, you’ll be coaching forever.

Secrete Motorcycle Plans Realized

Here she is - $500 worth of beauty. I've ridden 4k miles on that $500 so far, so I guess I've done alright.


Anyway, this week I didn't have much of anything to post, so I'm making one of my many blogish posts that I promised never to make and I will now proceed to tell you all about what I had for dinner last night and how I was feeling when I ate and after I ate and all that crap you don't care about.

Actually, I think I'll post a bunch of pictures that I have hanging around. Because that sounds like fun.


This is my grill. Behold its majesty. I said behold it.










This is a shot of me and the boys.













...and with the older girls.












This is my son who has tragically mutated into Michael Chiklis.


















And, finally, this is the Duchess and Lady Macbeth, hamming it up for the camera.






This has been an exciting entry, for sure. Next week I'll be posting cat pictures and talking about what kind of socks I bought. See you then.

New Book Section

As the last major revision to my book, I have replaced the entire section about becoming a firefighter with the following section about feeding time at the zoo.

Meal Time Is Family Time

You know how sometimes you are cruising along in life thinking everything is just fine and dandy – perhaps you’re right where you want to be financially, you have the right job, your marriage is perfect, your car is perfect and you have a perfect tan, fresh from a vacation in the Bahamas? And then something happens to make all that go sideways in the blink of an eye? It may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it could be. Maybe it’s a layoff at work, maybe it’s a promotion at work, maybe it’s being chased by a pack of wolves on the way to work – it could be anything, but the point is that now your carefully balanced and perfect little world is suddenly thrown into turmoil and can’t tell which way is up and everything feels like you are sinking and surviving all at once and you lay in bed awake all night with a cold sweat and a feeling of anticipation and anxiety and nobody could possibly understand what you are going through but it’s real, dammit, and you have to deal with it no matter what you would choose to do and all you want to do it find that light at the end of the tunnel but you’re so lost in the dark you have no freakin’ idea which way to turn to look for the light and the next thing you know you’re yelling at the toaster because it’s so slow and stupid and you are certainly headed for a breakdown and SOMETHING FOR THE LOVE OF PETE HAS GOT TO GIVE? You know what I mean? You know that feeling?

Life at the Bradbury house doesn’t ever cruise along on an even keel – it starts at the crazy-yell-at-the-toaster stage as the calmest it gets. And, unfortunately, this level of calm usually only lasts for the fleeting moments when all five kids are asleep. The interesting crazy usually breaks out five or six minutes before I’m ready to get up in the morning, which I find to be the cruelest kind of joke. I can stay up all night long with a kid who has a 102 temp. I can jump up at 3 a.m. to respond to a little girl having a nightmare or to a strange noise downstairs. I can wake up at 5 a.m. to get started on a school paper I have put off until the last minute. I can do all that without complaint, and honestly, without being terribly tired. However, getting woken up at five to seven when my alarm is set for seven drives me mad.

No, I don’t have a good explanation for this. I have sort of a bad explanation, which would be that I suppose I feel that if I set my alarm for 7 a.m., I should be able to sleep until 7 a.m. without being awoken for some totally pointless reason like the cat being on fire again. For some insane reason I have gotten it lodged in my tiny brain that the time leading up to my alarm sounding is me time. Me time. That’s amusing, just thinking of it, writing this here in the fire station at midnight after I’ve already finished my other work. Ha. Me time usually comes so late at night or so early in the morning I can’t think straight and I have trouble focusing and remembering what the hell I was writing about and the next thing you know I’ve babbled on for two pages and absolutely nothing has gone well and I need to shake my head and try to remember what the hell I was writing about.

What was I writing about?

Oh, yeah – meal times. The reason I was leading into the eating section with chaos is because meal time is chaos time at the Bradbury house. Mostly because feeding seven people is a major production in and of itself and this has to be wedged into the rest of the day which, as we know, pretty much consists of driving around all day from one place to another in a mindless haze of sports, errands and shopping. Frankly, my life would be a lot easier if we didn’t need to eat. Not that I want to stop feeding the kids, because I understand that to be a Bad Thing, but that I wish none of us had the need to eat unless we wanted to. Of course, while I’m wishing for major modifications to the body’s grand design, I wish we didn’t have to sleep, either, but that’s neither here nor there.

Unfortunately, the kids do have to eat and I’m the one who feeds them. The best way for me to properly convey the feeding process is, as you know, interpretive dance. Since that still isn’t an option, I’ll just break down the way it goes – three meals and two snack times a day. We’ll assume it’s either summer or a weekend and the kids aren’t in school, so I’m going to oversee/prepare all feeding times at the zoo.

Breakfast
This is usually the thing that wakes me up five minutes before the alarm clock – some kid will burst into the room and announce that we “DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MILK FOR BREAKFAST!” “Enough milk” being defined as an amount sufficient as to allow five children to eat two bowls of cereal so disgusting and sugary it makes ants sick to their stomachs. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day, so it’s important to ensure that meal consists of the Recommended Yearly Allowance of sugar and chocolate. I’m not sure why or how it became acceptable to eat candy for breakfast, but it has. And I’m not just talking about sweetened cereal, either. For one thing, everyone loads the unsweetened cereal, such as Cheerios, with sugar – not just my kids, but all kids (except maybe few extremely odd people who must have serious, serious issues to be eating Shredded Wheat without sugar).

But sweets for breakfast isn’t limited to just cereal. I like to cook what we call at our house Big Breakfast, which generally consists of pancakes or French toast, along with bacon or sausage and possibly eggs. What goes on top of the pancakes and French toast? Liquefied sugar, of course, promoted under the pseudonym of “table syrup.” That’s the stuff that used to be called “maple syrup” until that freaking pesky FDA started demanding truthful labels on items and it became difficult to justify calling something maple syrup when the stuff consists of 99% corn syrup. So really, even when I get up and cook breakfast, it’s not really that much better for them. I may as well just inject some sugar directly into their veins, stick a diabetes medic alert bracelet on them and go back to sleep.

Anyway, after I wake up to a child informing me that there is no milk, I know in my heart that I need to run to the store to get a couple gallons. Why? Because the kids could sit there and fuss all day long about their cereal being dry and I could probably live with it, but I can’t drink my first cup of coffee with no milk, so off I go.

The upside to this process is that I get about five minutes to myself in the supermarket in the morning. I have to go all the way to the supermarket, because the people who own the convenience store at the end of the block are only a ski mask away from being armed robbers with the prices they charge for a gallon of milk, and I just don’t have the thirteen bucks or whatever they charge for a gallon of milk. The upside is that I like the supermarket when two things coincide: a few moments without the kids and very few other customers because normal people can remember to get milk the night before so they don’t need to run to Stop N Shop and wait for them to unlock the doors at 7 a.m. There’s nothing like a leisurely stroll through the American excess we call the grocery store to put things in perspective – as long as we still have enormous store with shelves stacked floor to ceiling with such necessities as Fruit By The Foot and microwave popcorn, I know that the terrorists have not won.

Anyway, I admit to taking more time at the store in the morning than I probably need – I don’t think it is absolutely necessary for me to stare with wonder for five minutes at the sheer variety of laundry detergents, and I’m almost certain there is no good reason for me to stop and read Star magazine and get caught up on Brad and Jen, but I am unable to help myself. The supermarket just makes me feel good. Don’t tell my wife that I take my time, thought, as the morning is fairly hectic and to have it discovered that I lollygag on my way to the dairy section – the dairy section cleverly located in the far back corner – could be detrimental to my Secret Motorcycle Plans.

When I finally get the two gallons of milk – we buy it two gallons at a time when we can’t afford three – I like to come back, place one gallon on the dining room table for the kids, then bring the other gallon to the fridge where I discover not one, but two gallon milk containers which are each half full. In the children’s defense, these containers are usually cleverly hidden behind…who am I kidding? The damn things are always right there, clearly indicating that the child who informed me we were out of milk is either going blind or is a liar bent on driving me crazy. Since they get yearly vision tests at school, I can only assume they are trying to drive me crazy. And I think it’s working.

The nice thing about breakfast is that I don’t have to do anything beyond provide milk from 17 cows and 32 bags of sweetened cereal (Yes, bags – we buy the store brand bags of cereal, alright? It’s cheaper and it tastes the same). From there, the kids are fairly self-sufficient – by which I mean they each pour their own cereal and milk, almost all of which goes in the bowls. One of them – I forget who – has been tasked with feeding Lady Macbeth, so all I need to do is make my coffee and go behind them and clean the tremendous mess they made – this has to be done in a hurry, because a Frooty O (that’s a Froot Loop that comes in a bag) which has been dropped on a dining room chair will not only stick with the tenacity of super glue, but it will leave behind a fruity color ring when it is finally dislodged – could be purple, yellow, red or green. As a general rule, I try not to consider that this thing which has managed to discolor a wooden chair is what I fed my kids for a meal.

Mid-morning Snack
“Mid-morning” is best defined as “twelve minutes after breakfast ends,” because that is when at least one child will begin asking me whether or not it is snack time. Snacks consist of two items – a piece of fruit and a piece of junk. The junk is packaged as real food, but it bears little resemblance to anything of nutritional value. Fruit Roll-ups – a perennial favorite – are to actual fruit what hot dogs are to canines. Chew granola bars probably contain actual granola, but they coat it with so much crap and then load it with chocolate chips and other weird items that they are really not much different from candy bars. Of course, by purchasing chewy “granola” bars instead of, say, Three Musketeers, I can continue my charade of healthy eating. Sometimes I buy the regular hard, inedible granola bars, but no on will eat them, and frankly, I’m not too sure what granola is or what it is made from or whether bona fide granola bars are good for you anyway, so it probably makes no difference.

Other snack items include the peanut butter crackers and cheese crackers family or foods and their bastard cousins, the cheese crackers with peanut butter. This is one of those areas I can’t quite remember who likes what and who likes the other, but I’m fairly certain that there are warring factions in my house and the line of demarcation is whether you are pro peanut butter crackers or pro cheese crackers. I try to remain neutral, like a snacky Switzerland. The only thing I know is that the “cheese” crackers don’t require refrigeration, so I think that tells us all we need to know about the dairy content of that particular item.

Peanut butter crackers also lead to a whole different set of problems when it comes to snacks sent with the kids during the school year. When I was a kid, peanut butter was not only a major food group to be eaten in at least three servings a day, but it was considered to be a relatively benign substance when looked at from a non-consumption point of view. Apart from misguided attempts to use peanut butter as an aid when attempting to extract a wad of chewed Bazooka from my sister’s hair, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating the brown paste, and I’m fairly certain my parents didn’t either – my mom would send us to Great Salt Bay school loaded with peanut butter and peanut butter related food substances and I can’t recall ever having Mr. Marchi freaking out over such an episode.

Sending a kid to school with a peanut butter sandwich today causes a slightly different reaction. I’d be better off strapping a load of TNT to Achilles’ chest and sending him to blow up the school bus than sending him with anything even vaguely related to the peanut family. Nut allergies are wreaking havoc on my lunch and snack plans. Slapping some peanut butter on two pieces of bread was always my fallback emergency snack when I couldn’t get my act together enough to get to the store for real snacks (“real” being defined as “sugar laden”). Things weren’t always this way, even for my kids.

When I first sent Mab to school, the nut allergy kids were sequestered at a single yellow table where peanuts were not allowed to venture – kind of a nut DMZ. The poor kids who were allergic to nuts had to sit by themselves and pretend they were normal, even though they were complete freaks. I kid, I kid. They weren’t complete freaks, but let’s face it, in 1976 if you had a kid in your class who had to sit at a table all by himself because your Fluff and Skippy sandwich might kill him, you’d have made fun of him. These days, of course, we don’t make fun of anyone and I’m pretty sure “freak” is not an acceptable term under any circumstances not involving a genuine circus act.

But even in that short amount of time since Mab started school, we are now to the point where nut allergies have completely dominated the children’s lunch menus. Some kids have such bad allergies that just being near the offending substance is enough to send them into anaphylactic shock, requiring a teacher to break out one of those nifty little EPI pens. Nut allergies are everywhere – so prevalent that establishments such as Dunkin Donuts feel compelled to post notices on their doors stating ATTENTION PATRONS: BANANA NUT MUFFINS CONTAIN NUTS, which seems like a waste of a sign, to me. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for the people who have nut allergies and will never taste the deliciousness that is a banana nut muffin from DD unless it is during a suicide attempt – I feel for these people. Deeply. It’s just that if we, as a society, have come to the point where we feel compelled to point out that banana nut muffins contain nuts, well, it’s just a sad day.

I mean, come on – let’s be realistic. If you have nut allergies, you probably ought to be somewhat wary of ordering any food substance that has NUT in the name. It’s not as if Dunkins is trying to trick people into eating these muffins by calling them “blueberry muffins” or “sage and licorice muffins ” or “completely free from nuts muffins.” There are only three words in the name and one of them is NUT – if that doesn’t tip you off, I don’t think a little sign on the door further explaining that the muffins contain nuts is going to help. If you are allergic to nuts and you actually order a banana nut muffin, you’re a moron and probably living on borrowed time anyway. At that point, I think it’s inevitable that you will kill yourself in some spectacularly stupid fashion which will likely get forwarded around the world in e-mails with the subject line “Darwin Awards.” Of course, by the time someone sends it to me the subject line will read “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Darwin Awards.” Can’t you people at least change the subject line back to something normal and delete some of the attached crap when you send me one of these e-mails so I don’t have to scroll down for ten minutes reading past the e-mail address of every person in the world with comments like “Check this out” and “Funny.” And while you are at it, do yourself a favor and run your urban legends pas Snopes.com before you forward them, because they are never true. Ever. Seriously – a terrorist’s girlfriend did not get an advance warning of a plot to blow up a mall on Halloween, shampoo does not contain a chemical known to cause cancer, no one from Nigeria will be sending you $35 million in exchange for getting the money out of the country and BILL GATES IS NOT GIVING AWAY MONEY FOR FORWARDING E-MAILS.

Sorry about that.

Of course, as much as I’d like them to be, nut allergies are not urban legends and the number of people coming down with them are increasing every year, and nobody knows why. I have my own theories, but the last time I tried to explain it to someone, she made me a tinfoil hat and told me to stay away from the internet for a while. Whatever the cause, it makes my life difficult because peanut buttery things are easy to send as snacks. Actually, it’s more annoying for my kids who are much more likely to get apple and apple for a snack when I can’t send peanut butter.

Lunch
Around noon, I am usually alerted that we are out of bread and so I can’t make sandwiches for lunch. If I’m lucky, I may have some mac and cheese or a couple of packets of Ramen noodles which will do in a pinch, but if not we make another rush trip to the store, this time with all the kids in tow because Stacy is at work. This is a major project which can take hours to complete if I’m not careful, and I have to be careful because any long delay in lunch time means a long delay for nap time which comes directly after lunch. And you know how I feel about nap time.

The worst part of this major project is actually leaving the house. Never is parenting more like herding cats than when you are trying to get them in the car in a hurry. First I walk around yelling for everyone to put their shoes on because we are going to the store. Then I recruit the first kid dumb enough to walk by to put Lady Macbeth’s shoes on, too. About five minutes later, 60% of the children will still be barefoot and I have to yell again to “Get your shoes on, we’re going!” This is met with the sound of feet thumping on the floor upstairs as people begin to scramble for shoes. However, somewhere during the next few minutes, Lady takes off her shoes because the child who put them on her put them on the wrong feet. Also, another child takes her shoes off, having decided to wear sandals. Ten minutes into the project we are back at 0% shoe wearing numbers. Which means I have to yell again, only this time I use my Serious Voice which indicates that I am no longer just telling them to put their shoes on for my health and I have moved into Punisher Dad mode. Oddly enough, I look around and I am able to find one child playing Gameboy without shoes – this child is totally surprised by the fact that I am now screaming and red in the face. Why in the world is Dad so mad, he is saying to himself as he wanders around looking for shoes. Finally, 20 minutes into the project I have achieved 100% shod status if you count the kid wearing mismatched sneakers as being shod (I usually do).

Next, I instruct one child to put the dog into his crate, another child to take a bag of garbage out on the way to the car and a third child to strap Lady into her car seat. Unfortunately, this leave one child with no job, which means he has time to wander back to his room and pull out every single toy he owns and spread them all over the upstairs and the living room. The speed at which he creates this mess is remarkable – something akin to supernatural in scope. While I yell at this child to clean up the mess, I notice that the child who was supposed to be putting Lady in the car seat has gone to the car without her, which, one would imagine, makes it difficult to put the baby in the seat. More yelling. More scrambling.

After we catch the dog who has escaped because the child assigned to put him in the crate went back to playing Gameboy and forgot what he was assigned, we get in the car. Where we find Lady sitting, but not buckled in. Also, there is a bag of garbage in the car because I didn’t specifically say what to do with the bag of garbage and somehow, the dog is now in the car.

Ten minutes of arguing about who is going to sit where and we’re on the road. We usually get all the way to the store before I realize I don’t have my wallet. Once we get back to the store a second time, I have an argument with the oldest child explaining why she cannot stay in the car and finally we are ready to enter the store. Amazing.

This is where the real fun starts.

There are all kinds of things the children enjoy at the grocery store which make me nuts – many of them involve touching every single thing on ever single shelf. A favorite trick is to run a hand down the jars of spaghetti sauce until a jar falls to the floor. Then they look really shocked like this was something totally unforeseeable. There I was, their little eyes say, minding my own business, when a jar of Ragu just fell on the floor. What was I to do?

Of course, everyone’s favorite trick is much simpler – just ask over and over again, “Can we get this?” It’s like a mantra for these miniature people. I don’t think they are even operating on the same wave of consciousness as the part of their brains which are asking this – it has become so automatic and engrained that they are probably calculating complex physics problems in their heads while their mouths continue to ask, “Can we get this?” More than 50% of the time, the thing they are asking for is something they wouldn’t eat in a million years, but has a flashy package. Can we get this? Well, sure, but it’s a package of wild rice, so I’m not sure you’d like it. Can we get this? Can we get this? Can we get this? I can take only so many of these queries in a single shopping trip – that number if flexible depending on my mood, but it is always one less than the children actually ask.

Now that I’m at the store for a second time, I’m clever enough to purchase dinner, too. I may be dumb enough to need to make two trips to the supermarket a day, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to make three. Once I have my cart full of groceries, we make our way to the checkout where I am hit with another barrage of Can We Have This accompanied by children actually trying to put that damned candy on the conveyor belt – I’d like to strangle the guy that came up with putting candy in the checkout aisles.

Finally, it’s back home where I will discover three loaves of bread in the freezer.

Afternoon Snack
As you might have guessed, this goes pretty much the same way as morning snack, except somewhere along the line my children got it into their heads that they should have tea, so we quite often have that. I’m not sure if the children secretly have Mary Poppins as a nanny when I’m not around or if the queen regularly drops by or where this tea habit came from, but there it is. So, apart from tea, afternoon snack is the same as morning snack.

Dinner
We do two things for dinner at the Bradbury household that set us apart from many other families. First, we make an effort to eat together. We try to sit down and have dinner each night at 6:30. Now, as the children get older and have more activities which take them out of the house for longer periods of time (I’m talking about mostly sports practices, but there are other things) this becomes more and more difficult. However, we still try to sit everyone down together and eat at the same time as often as we can.

The second thing that sets us apart is that we don’t eat in front of the television. Even if we are having pizza, we still sit down at the table and eat it as a family. That makes us really weird to many of the people I know – most of my friends have long ago stopped pretending their dining room table is a place to eat and use it as a place to store keys, books, random scraps of paper, magazines and old bits of mail. To eat at one of these tables would require a clean up effort which would only be realistic in execution if the EPA declared the table a Superfund Site and sent a team of specially trained agents to help for a month.

As crazy as the rest of the feedings at the Bradbury Zoo are, preparation for dinner is somehow worse. This is the direct result of two converging facts. 1) I like to cook, so I’d like to be left undisturbed while I create dinner – all I ask for is a little peace while I practice my art. 2) This is never, ever going to happen.

Why isn’t this going to happen? Because at 5:00, when I want to start cooking, everything in the world starts happening. Actually, it doesn’t start – it just doesn’t stop. While I am cooking dinner, I must help the Duchess with her homework because she needs a little extra help and individual attention. I sit her at a table in the kitchen while the other three work at the dining room table. Working with the Duchess requires all my brain activity, so cooking is not only a side project, but it becomes something I can’t really think about, so I have to prepare a meal easy enough to complete on autopilot.

In between helping the Duchess with her homework and cooking dinner, I have to help the other kids with their homework. The other three, as a general rule, can complete their homework without my help. Can is the operative word there – not do. Usually they attempt some sorry effort to make the homework appear to be finished, but upon closer inspection, I discover that they have done the easy problems and filled in random answers for the rest.

“Are you absolutely positive about this answer, Edward?”

“Yes, sir.” In my daydreams they all call me sir and treat me with respect.

“You don’t think you should check over this work again?”

“No.”

“And you really want me to believe that eight plus six is green?”

“That’s how my teacher told me to do it.”

That’s how my teacher told me to do it – this is the last ditch argument by all my children when they don’t want to re-work a problem. Of course she did, I usually say. Most teachers specifically tell you that if you run out of room at the bottom of the paper, you shouldn’t get a new piece – just smoosh half a page worth into the bottom inch. Of course your teacher wanted you to skip every fifth problem – sounds logical to me. I completely believe your teacher wanted you to complete your homework in purple crayon. Absolutely. After all, I was born yesterday, and I wouldn’t have a clue what a teacher would or wouldn’t want you kids to do.

By the time I have checked everyone’s homework, sent them back to correct it, checked it again, sent them back again, and checked it a third time, we’ve killed an hour. And at 6:00 the telemarketers call. And call. And call. Of course, this problem has pretty much been solved by the invention of caller ID, which I will never again be without. Unknown number. Hmm, I wonder if I should answer it? College Loan, Inc. – yeah, that sounds like someone I want to converse with in the middle of dinner prep. Out of area. I’m not even considering picking that up.

In the old days (read: before kids) no one ever called Stacy and me. The phone would ring about once a week and we would stare at each other as if this was obviously someone calling to inform us that New England was missing or that the mid-West had suddenly blown up. Over the years, telemarketing became a wildly popular way to waste people’s time and company money. At first we picked up all the calls, usually long distance carriers. There was a time when they were sending us checks to switch back and forth - $50 from MCI, $75 from AT&T, etc. For about two years I honestly believe we were paid more in cash to switch than we spent on long distance.

Then the telemarketers stopped offering us money to do things that essentially didn’t effect us one bit – this was when telemarketing became annoying. It also ratcheted up about 50 notches in quantity – we went from getting almost no calls to getting 10 day, all of which were telemarketing. So, we went through a span of four or five years where we just didn’t answer the phone at all. That system actually worked fine and I would have been willing to stick with it, but the kids finally hit that age where they had friends with irritating voices and those friends started calling the house on a routine basis, so suddenly the phone started ringing and I had to pick it up again and it was either a telemarketer or a child with an irritating voice – a lose/lose situation. Anyway, that’s when we got caller ID.

Which, I realize, doesn’t have much to do with the story, given that I don’t answer the phone anymore except to say, “Mab can’t come to the phone right now, she’s on the toilet.” Which is what I say to any boys that call while she’s doing homework. She gets a big kick out of it when I do that.

Once dinner is finally prepared and the children have set the table (a chore they have done so many times it only requires me to yell once or twice to complete), we all sit down for a family dinner. This part I’m not joking about. We sit down together and discuss how our days were and what we did. Sometimes we play a game called High/Low where each person tells the best thing that happened to them that day and each person tells the worst thing that happened (we unabashedly stole this from a movie). Other times each child must tell three things they learned that day. The thing the kids like the best, though, is when we quiz them on different topics and kids who answer correctly get extra minutes on their bedtime.

Usually, this is the best part of my day. I get to hear about the kids’ days and my wife’s day and I get to explain how much laundry I finished. It’s a regular 1950s TV moment where things are semi-calm (in the sense that no one is actually shooting at someone else – it can be pretty loud, though, so I can’t swear with any certainty that no shots have ever been fired at the table) and everything is beautiful. Of course, that only lasts so long, and after that it’s rush around, clean up the dinner mess, showers, teeth brushing, reading, cleaning rooms and off to bed. But the brief time I get to spend with everyone at the table is something I am enjoying while I can, because I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll be sitting around a big empty house with my wife and we’ll be wishing for those loud and obnoxious dinners when the kids tell us about getting a homerun in kickball or scoring 100 on a spelling test. A matter of time.

Rules number 4 and 5

Rule #4

Don't make me slap you.


Rule #5

How to greet someone

Hugging. Women can hug women, women can hug men. Men do not hug other men. If you are extremely close to the other man – say, you fought the Taliban together in Afghanistan – you may give the “guy hug.” The guy hug is performed by shaking hands, keeping the hands together as you left arm goes up around the other man’s shoulder and you lean in with your shoulders. Your feet and pelvis should remain back where they would be during just a handshake.

Actually, that goes for women hugging men, as well. Unless you know the guy in the carnal sense (or want to), you hug with your shoulders. You should avoid pressing your boobs against him and your pelvic region shouldn’t even factor into the hug. I think this is an American thing, because when my female friends from other countries hug, they always give a full body hug which, while exciting and fun, can lead to confusing situations and unwanted arousal.

Kissing. You know what? Kissing should be regulated the same way as full body hugging – not required unless you are planning to make a move on the person. I don’t want a kiss on the cheek unless you buy me dinner first. No kissing.

Hand shaking. This is your go-to greeting – the old standby. Which doesn’t mean some of you aren’t so bad at shaking hands your attempt resembles a monkey humping a football. First, it’s not a contest of strength, Arnold. There’s no need to prove you’ve been lifting weights and sprinkling anabolic steroids all over your cornflakes – everyone will have already noticed that you no longer have a neck. On the other hand, don’t leave a limp wrist and hand out there that will make people question your sexuality (and, as with most rules of etiquette, the main point is to prove to people you aren’t gay and the second point is to not catch The Gay). Women can shake hands pretty much however they want and get away with it, although I still don’t suggest the power crush grip.

Waving and variations. This is a very complicated subject in and of itself, so I will need to save this explanation for a time when it can be its own entry. There are so many variables that I don’t even know where to start. Physical location, how well you know someone, etc. Really, it’s a nightmare that we should probably be working to destroy - there are too many ways to mess this up. When is a wave acceptable? When is a head nod ok? When do I need to stop and talk to someone? What is my obligation to wave if I'm walking toward someone I know I am going to actually speak to? It's all very complicated and I don't want to get into it today.

Because I'm lazy, that's why.

The Billing Clerk Story

This is a story I wrote back in 1997 when I first became the Strange Biller. It basically describe the origin of Strange Biller and how he got here. I transcribed it quickly and didn't edit, because I thought that was truer to the original. Also, because as we all know, I am lazy.

The Billing Clerk Story

This is the story of a billing clerk gone mad. He wasn’t mad to begin with, mind you, which is why this is the story of a billing clerk gone mad, not a billing clerk who was always mad and tortured animals and stuff when he was a little kid. No, this billing clerk started out just as normal as any other billing clerk in the world – happy, oblivious and resigned to his sad and pathetic role in life as one of God’s crunchers of meaningless numbers in an industry of unholy terror. Health care.

His first day on the job he nearly died of a massive coronary as he was shown the 632 steps required to send a bill to a modern health insurance company. Fortunately, he was revived with defibrillators kept on site for just such an emergency – he was, after all, in the health care industry. Unfortunately, he was merely 127 steps into the process when he suffered this first heart irregularity. It was a long day for the billing clerk, as he required frequent defibrillation and plenty of water to keep him going. In the afternoon he was introduced to third party administrators and at one point was declared legally dead by a doctor on his way to pour a cup of coffee. Lucky for him, God Himself reached down from the sky and gave his heart one last jolt to get him moving.

God had a funny way of doing that to the billing clerk when he got himself into these situations. Like the time the billing clerk, then a restaurant critic, choked on a piece of pork at an upscale BBQ pit. Or the time the billing clerk, then an interior designer, spilled an entire bucket of lead paint on a rich client’s dog – a dog who later decided to take revenge on the billing clerk, then a postal worker, and tried to kill him with an exploding package. Or like the time the billing clerk, then a mercenary for hire, tried to join the Zapatista rebels, only to find both sides of the fighting wanted to kill him. You get the point – the billing clerk walked with Jesus and often found it convenient to have himself revived from otherwise fatal falls, gunshots and stabbings. The man kicked ass when it came to rallying.

But when it came to billing, the man took his profession seriously. He learned the ropes quickly, including the dangerous process of completing HFCA 1500s with the greatest of courage, once saving the entire office from certain destruction by throwing himself on a pile of EOBs that were about to go off. He was methodical, calculating and – deep down inside – just a little crazy to begin with, despite what the opening paragraph would have you believe. And every day that he billed the bills and walked the walk of an accounts receivable badboy, his brain became just a bit more unstable. More dangerous. More electric. Soon, the man was completely unglued and spewing heretical statements about BlueCross and BlueShield, Tufts and even (gasp) Medicare.

Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but he claimed God had spoken to him in a dream and told him to build a billing machine. The biggest, most impressive billing machine the world had ever seen. The kind of billing machine God would build if God needed a billing machine. Of course, God doesn’t need a billing machine any more than he needs, say, baby powder, but the point is, this would be God’s Billing Machine, powered by the Holy Ghost, baby. Take a ride on the wild side with Jesus driving your billing machine.
Your mad, they said. Insane, they said. Actually, they said these things to him on a regular basis in months preceding his announcement of plans to build God’s Billing Machine, but up to that point there had always been a little bit of doubt in their voices, like they thought he might be crazy but couldn’t be sure. And then this – he comes to work one day covered in chicken blood (again), raving about some sort of machine powered by God that would revolutionize the industry. What does one make of that sort of thing?

But I’m not crazy, he said, and I’m not insane, and I’m only a little bit nutty. He was possessed by the spirit of greatness and greatness is often misunderstood. There is a fine line between insanity and greatness when inventing something as complex as a billing machine or a peanut butter hat. Still, the billing clerk pitched his idea for a billing machine for years, all to no avail. Doctors laughed at him. Practice managers threw him out of the office. Nurse practioners covered him in honey and lapped it off like naughty little puppies – bad doggie, bad. The billing clerk never gave up, though. He knew God had chosen him to build the billing machine for a reason and he promised he would never quit. I’ll show them, he would shout at squirrels in the park. I’ll show them all. You’ll see.

One day, a stroke of luck, twist of fate, turn of events - whatever you want to call it – happened that was so important to our story that it deserves its own paragraph.

The billing manager died.

No one was quite sure how and no one really cared why, but while on hold with Harvard Pilgrim Community Healtcare to check the status of a seventeen year old claim, she up and kicked it. The billing clerk tried to revive her by waving a fresh batch of insurance checks under her nose, but it was too late – she had gone to that big waiting room in the sky.

Which left the billing clerk in charge. No asked him to be the manager – no one even wanted him to be the manager, but it was too late. He had assumed command of the SS Billing and was charging full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, prepare the coordination of benefits for firing. His dream was finally within reach, and he began working on his billing machine.

Built from old banana peels and discarded Chevy parts, the machine was a behemoth of biblical proportions, just as it had been in his dreams. It was a thing of beauty, running on a combination of Mountain Dew and diesel fuel and a touch of cough syrup (a little Robitusin for the machine, a little for the clerk). The machine sat there in the middle of the office belching black smoke and toxic fumes for weeks on end. Skeptics continued to talk behind his back, mocking his creation. Disbelievers abounded. Annoying flirts walked by in sweaters so tight you could have bounced a quarter off them. Not one person believed the machine would work except the billing clerk.

One day the billing clerk came to the realization that the machine didn’t have any function except billing, and for some reason he couldn’t even make it do that. It was finished – that much he was sure of. After all, he built it and he dreamed it, so he should know whether it was finished or not. But how to make it bill?

The billing clerk struggled with this question for months, to no avail. He could not make the machine bill, no matter how he struggled. Then came another dream.

He dreamt he was looking back at his life, mapped out in footprint in the sand on a beach. During the good times of his life, there were two sets of prints, side by side. But during the bad times, there were only one set. The billing clerk confronted God and asked why during the most demanding and trying times of his life – such as the time he was caught in the ladies dressing room trying on ladies underwear at Filenes – did the Lord abandon him like day old bread? God looked at the billing clerk and shook his head. You sorry fucking bastard, He said.

Then it was 6:00 a.m. and the billing clerk’s alarm was going off, signaling the start of another work day in which the billing clerk would monkey with the billing machine which would never, ever bill. Why? Because this is the story of a billing clerk gone mad, not a billing clerk who revolutionized billing. How did you think it would end?

More Etiquette Lessons With Professor Henry Biller

This week's entry is rushed and poorly edited (by which I mean, not edited at all). You probably won't be able to tell the difference from an average entry.

Rule #3 – Men’s room behavior

In case you lack a penis and the appropriate disguises to infiltrate the men’s room, you ladies may be unaware that there are extremely important guidelines which must be followed at all times and with the precision of a guided missile (Ha! Look - the first double entendre of the column!).

To begin with, when you first enter the men’s room to take a leak, you are faced with the immediate decision of which urinal to choose. If there are three urinals, you must chose one of the end two. That way if another man shows up after you, he won’t have to stand right next to you, as he will be free to use the other end urinal. If a man is already using the middle urinal when you enter the bathroom, you are advised, but not required, to use the stall. If there are two urinals, you are free to choose either one; however, should a man already be using one, it is advised, although not required, that you use the stall. If there is only one urinal and someone is already using it, you must use the stall, because the only other option is to pee on the back of his legs, and this is almost universally considered to be bad form. (I’m sad that I have to describe peeing on someone as “almost” always a bad thing.)

Which segues nicely into our next point: Do not stand in line and wait for a urinal when there are other options open, i.e., another urinal or an empty stall. It’s just creepy.

In those situations where you absolutely must pee standing next to someone (a club or ball game where all urinals and stalls are in constant use), you are to step forward toward the urinal, keep your eyes glued to the spot on the wall in front of you and for the love of all that’s holy, DO NOT TALK TO ANYONE. Hell, you shouldn’t even look at your own junk, let alone strike up a conversation with the guy next to you. This is just a common sense guy rule for all times – do not strike up a conversation with anyone who has a penis in his/her hand. It’s either his own, which leaves the conversation one sided and awkward, or it’s someone else’s, and while I have no personal experience with this, I’m pretty sure it would make for an even more awkward conversation.

The obvious exception being that it is ok to talk to someone who has your penis in his/her hand. You may, however, wish to restrict your comments to talking dirty and avoid discussing last night’s ballgame, etc.

Moving right along….

Should you need to use the stall for its intended purpose of dropping the kids off at the pool, you’re pretty much on your own with whatever freaky weird paranoid routine you have of lining the seat with toilet paper, wiping it down with a portable Lysol wipe you carry in your pocket – whatever it takes to put you in the mood, Skipper. There are only two rules to follow. First, you are required to lock the stall door. It may seem obvious, but too many men just pull the door shut which leaves the chance that another man will just pull the door open, putting him at risk for an accidental penis viewing, which, as we all know, is the easiest way to catch The Gay.

Second, when you are alone in the bathroom, sitting on the hopper and you hear the door open, you are required to rustle some toilet paper, rattle your belt buckle or cough to alert the other man to your presence. Why? So he doesn’t start doing something freaky before he discovers you are there. I don’t even want to get into the number of freaky things he could be doing. If the internet has taught me one only one thing, it’s that my own fairly perverted sexual fantasies look like Amish porn compared to some of the things people desire.

Last, when you are done with your business, wash your hands and get the fuck out. There is no reason to hang around in there – leave that to the ladies. Public men’s rooms are dirty, filthy places where men take their pee-pees out – it’s not a place to discuss a work problem or the latest trend in music. Every minute you spend in there increases the likely-hood that you already have The Gay or you’ll soon contract it.

Next time: The proper way to greet and say good-bye.