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Ruthless self-promotion first: Does your dad read? Sure he does. I bet he likes space ogres! And if he doesn’t, you should buy my book anyway as a Father’s Day present to me. Plus you’ll like it. I promise. Two dolla ninety-nine cent!

(I will come to your house and root around in your couch until I find $2.99 if you want me to. But you have to buy the book first. 🙂 )

Anyway. Ruthless self-promotion ends.

A new thing entered my life yesterday. This probably should have happened much earlier, but I somehow managed to dodge it for nearly three years: the dreaded “play date.” One of the girls in my son’s day care group recently changed day cares, and she was apparently quite fond of my son, so her mother contacted my wife and set up a thing for us at a local place called the House of Bounce. Basically a whole lotta inflatable shit for the kids to run around and do what they wanted on, right? Fun.

It was… interesting. True fact: I am 9% whiter than I was yesterday.

I went back and forth several times on whether I wanted to go. The problem here is that I have two basic impulses that are at war with each other. The first is to not be either literally absent or perceived as absent from my kid’s life. The second, unfortunately, is to never be around other people or do new things ever. I am a homebody, folks, and it’s not far enough into the summer that I’m starving to get out of the house yet. Going to this would require me to mingle with strangers, which I’m not good at. It might even require… horrors… polite conversation. Gah! Run away! I don’t know how to converse with people I can’t say “motherfucker” in front of!

My urge to be Dad won out, as I recognize that the impulses described in the second half of that paragraph are probably best ignored. And it was fine. I had fun. They have two kids, one Kenny’s age and one a year or so younger, and we ended up going out to lunch afterwards, where I was able to watch soccer when I wasn’t trying to help wrangle three different toddlers and wondering what the hell had happened to my life that I had become part of the folks trying to wrangle three toddlers in the restaurant. I’ve never been that guy before. It was weird.

There were a few moments. First, both parents in the other couple came along, which again triggered two warring impulses: 1) Oh, good, my wife doesn’t look like a single parent/ there’s more people to talk to, and 2) Oh, god, he’s not going to want to talk about sports ball or something, is he? Because while I wanted to be watching soccer, I know nothing about soccer and can’t actually participate in a conversation about it, and I know less than nothing about any other typically male go-to conversation topic. As I’ve said before, I just don’t know how to interact with men most of the time, so situations where I might have to go Be One Of The Guys tend to freak me the fuck out. Also, and I don’t mean this as insulting at all and in fact I think she’ll laugh and agree if she ever happens to see this, but Other Mom is… intense? I’ll use the word intense. And high-energy. So, so high-energy. Mildly exhausting, in fact. In a way that I very much am not. I’m too introverted to be that bouncy, especially around people I don’t know. Other Dad’s temperament was much more like mine and I suspect he may well have been going through the same stupid brain calculus I was for most of the day, so I suspect we’ll get along with these folks fine once the initial oh god I’m determining my own social relationships through my kid’s random friendships what the hell has happened to me thing wears off.

Putting this behind a Horizontal Line of New Topic, because in fact it is. One interesting conversation (and I mean “interesting conversation,” this isn’t a sarcastic way of suggesting that this will be funny) that came up was a discussion of why they moved their kids out of our day care. It revealed a very clear difference in how these folks see the purpose of day care from how I see it. They felt like their daughter wasn’t being challenged in day care enough. Her dad made the point that, for example, she recognizes “turquoise” and “mauve” (I think those were the colors he picked) and can count to, say, twenty, whereas the day care is working on primary colors with the kids and counting to ten.

(My son can also count to twenty and recognizes all his letters, but I don’t think he knows the word “turquoise.” This was my first moment of oh god my kid is behind as a parent, too, another impulse I’m trying to ignore.)

Anyway. They want their kid at a day care where her turquoise-knowledge is recognized, so they moved her to another one that’s a bit more academic. And that’s cool, right? I’m not criticizing their decision– it just intrigues me that I don’t give one thin damn what they’re “teaching” the kids at day care. As far as I’m concerned, here’s day care’s job:

Give my son a chance to be around lots of kids his age that he can play with, because I’m sure as hell not going to do that myself, and
Keep him alive.

“Teach him stuff” just isn’t even on my agenda right now. I mean anywhere. Let him play all day, don’t ever even mention letters. I’m fine with that. I figure teaching him to read is my job. Like, he’s only there because my wife and I can’t afford for one of us to quit working. That doesn’t mean that I need somebody else to teach him colors and letters. I need somebody to keep my kid safe when I can’t be there, and I need a way for him to play with other kids his age because for the most part we don’t hang out with anybody with little kids and he doesn’t have any siblings or cousins.

I don’t know that there’s a conclusion to be drawn here, other than a mild ironic bit of entertainment that the person who doesn’t care if his kid gets educated at day care or not is the actual professional educator in the conversation. The difference in priorities just intrigues me. I think I’m cool with continuing to not worry about it, but I’ll spend some time thinking about whether I’m wrong about that. And feel free to weigh in in comments one way or another if you like.

Happy Father’s Day, y’all.

simpsons You may have noticed; I’ve talked about it around here as recently as last week: I tend to be a homebody. I used to be a lot more social than I am now, but it takes quite a bit to overcome my societal inertia nowadays. Like… I dunno, a superhero movie. That’s about it.

A couple of weeks ago I committed to being part of a team for a fundraiser trivia night. I did this when “February 1” sounded like it was way off in the future, so far off that I’d never actually live that long. My wife, a bigger fan of trivia than I, also committed. Then we realized on Thursday night that February 1 was in two days and sorta had to scramble for a babysitter. Whoops.

I was at OtherJob all day Saturday, watching shitty weather happening and dealing with a miserably low number of customers. I got a lot of stuff done, but I got no school stuff done at all and so I got home in kind of a crappy mood and in no way interested in mingling with puny humans. The fact that a solid majority of the people we were competing with were going to be strangers made it worse. I don’t do mingling well. I am worse at mingling when in a preexisting bad mood.

My wife made me go. I scowled, but I agreed.

Trivia Night was at the Fraternal Order of Police’s bingo hall. I’d never been in the part of town where it was; easy enough directions, but a lot of looking around for the place we’re going, in the dark and bad-visibility snow.

Oh! Look! A bingo hall. My wife notes that there’s no signage declaring the place to be an FOP.

“There’s no way in hell there’s two bingo halls on the same road,” I say, and we pull in. And we drive past the place. There’s bingo happening inside, and I can’t quite describe why but the place, which was all windows in front, looked like it very well could have been the most depressing building on the planet. I wanted to kill myself just driving past it.

And it was pretty clearly not the FOP. Weird. Well, back on the road.

Two minutes later, we’re driving past a second bingo hall. “This has to be it,” I said, and then we noticed the entire building was dark. So… that’s two bingo halls, on the same road, and neither of them is the one we’re looking for?

Where the hell am I and what the hell is going on? Am I still on Earth? Is it still 2014?

No, the bingo hall we wanted was the third such hall on the same road. We found it. The parking lot was packed, and mostly unplowed. We had to drive entirely around the building and park behind it. There are what looks like millions of people trying to crowd into this place, and my misanthropy has already been well and truly activated.

We walk in. Now, we’re supposed to pay to get in, and the table is registered under the name of one of the members of our group, which makes me think there’s an assigned table for us. We walk in and there’s like fifty tables scattered around, none of them numbered. There’s a woman standing by the door who looks semi-official, but me making eye contact with her just makes her look at me funny, and she doesn’t have any paperwork or anything with her, so we’re… just supposed to look around, I guess? And pay… somebody? Eventually?

Luckily for me our group ended up being by the door; I don’t think I had the heart to search for too long.

Two things become immediately apparent to me: one, I should have taken the “bring a snack” suggestion that I was given much more seriously. There are 45-50 teams of 10 here. These motherfuckers have decked their tables out like goddamn Thanksgiving dinner. They look like they’re tailgating at the Super Bowl. “Snack” does not quite cover it– “each team member will bring enough food to feed thirty people” is slightly more accurate. I spent a moment considering just wandering around the room and seizing food from people’s tables, first to see if they’d even notice, and second to see if they would let me.

Not a joke: one table I walked past several times over the course of the night had six large pizza boxes on the table. For ten people. And there was a lot of other food that was not pizza. Our table, mostly composed of newcomers who had no idea of the, uh, local culture, had a meat and cheese plate, some brownies and a sad-ass bag of Krunchers. And Bek and I hadn’t even brought that.

The second apparent thing: What with judges and employees and bartenders and everything else in addition to the teams there are six hundred people in this place and every single damn one of them is white. Weird fact about me: I am as pasty-complexioned as one can be and I avoid the sun as one avoids the wrath of God, but large groups of white people make me deeply nervous. I spent twenty damn minutes trying to find, at the very least, somebody who looked like they might have had a Hispanic grandparent or, hell, somebody vaguely Jewish-looking, and nope. Nothing. So as soon as these folks get all het up about whatever white Republicans who go to FOP trivia nights like to get het up about, they’re gonna find my ass.

I look under the table to see if there are hoods and robes. No such luck.

Then the PA announcement for, I swear to God, “Ray Lee Ray” to come to the judges’ table, and I had to be physically restrained from fleeing. Nothing good ever happened around anybody who was named Ray twice. And if Ray Lee Ray is running shit then I need to get myself gone, now.

I brace myself for the prayer before the trivia night starts. Amazingly, it doesn’t happen. Which causes me to relax, just a tiny bit.

There’s actually no punch line to this story; once the actual event got rolling and everybody sat down and stopped creeping me out, it was fun and went well. I just did not walk in remotely prepared for what I was going to be greeted by, which is my fault. We got 82 of the 100 questions right, and it probably should have been a little higher– there was at least one question that we would have gotten right if, like an idiot, I had not overlooked the existence of an “all the above” answer, a fact that aggravates me deeply, because I yell at my kids for that kind of shit all the time. That wasn’t a high enough score to place. The wife won a gift basket. And I had a bizarre moment at a urinal that I may save for another post. (How’s that for burying the lede?)

But, yeah: I live in a place where there are three bingo halls within a two-mile stretch of the same damn road. I may need to move.