Just a couple of anecdotes about the election.
1. I took my toddler with me to vote (what else would I do with her?) and I must admit I did have a sense of "this is an historic experience and a wonderful memory that I am sharing with you - because I am such a fucking great mom if I take you to vote" This was completely lost on my toddler. She was in fact very, very excited to go with me, actually humming throughout our short walk to the polls. She told me many times on our way there that she would see many "exciting and instresting things" (I can spell, she can not pronounce - I'm practicing capturing dialects). Once I was in the actual booth, she happily played underfoot. I did try to show her that I was inking in the bubble for the first black president. She was unimpressed. I finished my business and we left. Upon our return home, my daughter asked me when we would be getting there (to the polls). When I explained to her we had already been, she became deeply disappointed - "but where are the boats!?" she shrieked.
Apparently she was excited to be going boating, and was not, as I previously believed, excited to be experiencing democracy first hand and going voting.
2. My five year old son has a new knock-knock joke. And this one shows a world of improvement in his sense of humor. Old jokes went something like this:
Knock-Knock
Who's There?
Poop.
Poop Who?
Poop-a-lock-a-chock-a-nonny-moo-moo
(Pardon the pun, but no shit, that's how he told jokes). Anyway, here's his new one:
Knock-Knock
Who's There?
Broccoli
Broccoli Who?.
Broccoli Obama!
And there's something wonderful in that. From this election my boy took nothing but a similarity between name and vegetable. And that in itself is what's fantastic about Obama's election, that my five year old son saw nothing more significant than the material for a better knock-knock joke!
Friday, November 7, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Daylight Savings Time
Most of the United States "fell back" this weekend, early this morning actually. Conventional wisdom says that we should be grateful for this artificial time change because it comes with this amazing bonus gift of extra time - a whole hour to be exact!
But I take issue with conventional wisdom (and the obviously childless legislators that brought this whole scheme to us in the first place).
My gripe is as follows:
Who needs an extra hour at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
I need an extra hour on Tuesday morning at 7:15 - when I am trying to make ghost shaped pancakes for the sixth morning in a row, while looking for one left gym shoe with Velcro closures and special mittens that have glove fingers and a flip top mitten cover (they’re called "glomits"), and making two completely different lunches.
And I need an extra hour again at 2:45 pm, simply to forestall the ending of the school day and the necessary retrieval of two very tired, very hungry, and very needy children, who require snacks, bathrooms, and general attention at the same moment that their toddler sister falls asleep in the car seat, covered in apple juice and chocolate chunks (one would think it would be pretty hard to fall asleep sitting up all hopped up on natural and artificial sweeteners, but apparently it can be done!)
I don’t need an extra hour at 5:45 pm on Sunday evening, after the children have been fed (because children, like senior citizens, must eat at the same time every day no matter what the clock says) and long after they have used up their allotted daily TV time. And I don’t need that hour because the crushing weight of that extra hour and our collective need to fill it can lead to desperate measures like a family game of Chutes and Ladders, which can take much more than an hour to complete - especially when playing with a habitual cheater and a third grader who thinks its utterly hilarious to do one good deed (help an injured dog) and then immediately follow it by eating an entire plate of cookies, throwing up and then reading a comic book during history class.
What’s more, I absolutely do not need an extra hour at 7:45 pm on Sunday night. Especially, when that extra hour perverts what just last night was a glorious fifteen minutes until bedtime and stretches it into an almost unbearable hour and fifteen minutes until bedtime.
I think that if the government is going to impose this extra hour on me, especially if its going to be on the same weekend as Halloween - a night in which all of the carefully planned rules and routines of every household are handily discarded in favor of candy, children running through the neighborhoods in the dark and talking to each and every stranger they encounter - then the architects of "daylight savings time" should offer this package deal to America’s parents: included with the requisite extra hour should be a bottle of wine and a magic pill that makes children happily bathe themselves and quickly tuck themselves into their beds - silently.
But I take issue with conventional wisdom (and the obviously childless legislators that brought this whole scheme to us in the first place).
My gripe is as follows:
Who needs an extra hour at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
I need an extra hour on Tuesday morning at 7:15 - when I am trying to make ghost shaped pancakes for the sixth morning in a row, while looking for one left gym shoe with Velcro closures and special mittens that have glove fingers and a flip top mitten cover (they’re called "glomits"), and making two completely different lunches.
And I need an extra hour again at 2:45 pm, simply to forestall the ending of the school day and the necessary retrieval of two very tired, very hungry, and very needy children, who require snacks, bathrooms, and general attention at the same moment that their toddler sister falls asleep in the car seat, covered in apple juice and chocolate chunks (one would think it would be pretty hard to fall asleep sitting up all hopped up on natural and artificial sweeteners, but apparently it can be done!)
I don’t need an extra hour at 5:45 pm on Sunday evening, after the children have been fed (because children, like senior citizens, must eat at the same time every day no matter what the clock says) and long after they have used up their allotted daily TV time. And I don’t need that hour because the crushing weight of that extra hour and our collective need to fill it can lead to desperate measures like a family game of Chutes and Ladders, which can take much more than an hour to complete - especially when playing with a habitual cheater and a third grader who thinks its utterly hilarious to do one good deed (help an injured dog) and then immediately follow it by eating an entire plate of cookies, throwing up and then reading a comic book during history class.
What’s more, I absolutely do not need an extra hour at 7:45 pm on Sunday night. Especially, when that extra hour perverts what just last night was a glorious fifteen minutes until bedtime and stretches it into an almost unbearable hour and fifteen minutes until bedtime.
I think that if the government is going to impose this extra hour on me, especially if its going to be on the same weekend as Halloween - a night in which all of the carefully planned rules and routines of every household are handily discarded in favor of candy, children running through the neighborhoods in the dark and talking to each and every stranger they encounter - then the architects of "daylight savings time" should offer this package deal to America’s parents: included with the requisite extra hour should be a bottle of wine and a magic pill that makes children happily bathe themselves and quickly tuck themselves into their beds - silently.
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