How to be a good dad: an idiot’s guide. Part 1

While I am, indisputably, a father.  I am also an idiot on occasion. For the countless other American males who are both idiots and dads (and it seems there is no shortage) this is an occasional series for you.  And me.

The first two things you, idiot, should do as a father are  ‘listening’ and ‘playing’.

Listening

Even when they want to talk about things that bore you to tears, listen.  For some reason it has become famously cool to disregard childish things.  I have learned that it is just as hard for a child to understand why certain things are so important to adults (a clean house, ‘alone’ time, work, eating something other than ham sandwiches) it is just as difficult for adults to understand the things that are important to children.  When you, as an idiot dad, say things like: ‘that’s not important’, or, ‘if you ask me to read that same helicopter book one more time I’m going to go Fahrenheit 451 on the library ‘, you are telling your kid that the things that are important to them are not important to you.  That means, in idiot speak, that you don’t care.  That stinks.  Don’t do that.

Just listen.  Once you’ve practiced doing that without jumping down your kids throat you can more to more complicated communication techniques such as ‘asking questions’.  It’s scary, but you can do it.  In other words, care about the things they care about.  If you don’t care then you should pretend that you do, in fact, care.  Do that long enough and you will forget you didn’t care in the first place.  It’s magic. 

Play

If you are a new dad then I need to explain something to you.  There will come a time, sooner rather than later, when your child will want to play the same game over, and over, and over, and over again.  And then they’ll want to play it more.  Pretending that you are a horsey is cute the first time.  But after months of “getty-up, daddy!” both you and your lower back might tire of this game.  But here’s the thing.  You should do it anyway.  Here’s why.

There will also come a day when your child will stop wanting to play horsey.  There might even come a day when your child will forget how you had to visit the chiropractor for months after playing Seabiscuit one too many times.  There will be days when your kids will seem, or be, very far away from you.  Even if they didn’t count the times you sacrificed a few vertebrae for their enjoyment, they will remember you were fun once.

Don’t be an idiot.  Listen and play.

Shocked

Things change so fast.  One minute you’re on top of the world, hopeful, optimistic, young.  Then it all comes crashing down.  My dreams are shattered, my joy gone.  Hope Schmope.

I use to have piles of respect for President-elect Obama.  I used to think that he was a different brand of politician and could bring about substantive change.  I studies his policies and read his books. I believed in him.  I trusted him.

No more.

He uses a Zune.

How can I ever trust his judgment again?

The original GW

America’s first President set a precedence for wacky hairdos that other Presidents would try to live up to for decades to come.

This is the first in a set that I plan on doing weekly.  Each will be based on the Presidents portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Next week: John Adams.

Finally. President Obama. Ha ha.

Caricature of Barack Obama and John McCain

The greatest part about this whole election cycle is that it is finally over.  I feel like I just finished watching two horse dwarfs mud wrestle for the last two years.  Geeze, it was horrendous.  I’ve tried to stay away from it for a few days so that I could avoid gloating.  Because I am too mature and above gloating.  Far, superior, I.

Not that I don’t want to gloat, boy oh boy, do I ever!  I’d love to make fun of every idgit that bought McCain’s claim that Obama was Satan in a sports jacket (it just made his oh-so-sincere concession speech seem that much more contrived – ‘We’re all gonna die! Heng heng.  I’ll support Satan because I’m such a maverick’).  I am tempted to call all of my conservative friends ‘comrade’.  I would be thrilled to relentlessly tease anyone who thought Sarah Palin had enough brain power to make a light bulb flicker.  Instead, she unseated Quayle for the most idiotic running mate in history.  A new standard has been set in political stupidity.  Another glass ceiling broken.

Sorry, that was gloating.  I won’t do it again.

I would like to think we can change our political system.  Not necessarily the mechanics, but the tone.  Maybe it is time we all try to find some common ground on the issues that have torn us all apart for so long, try harder to understand that our opponents are not our enemies, but people with hopes and dreams just like the rest of us.  I’m willing to give it a try.

But before I do that I would like to say: please, Sarah Palin, go away.  Far, far away.  Though you have given our country more laughs than Yakov Smirnov, I will not miss you.  Be gone.

Fine.  Sorry.  I apologize.  I’ll be better, I promise.

And what’s with the Republicans trying everything they can think up to make old white folks scared of President-elect Hussein Obomber?  First they said he was a Muslim (scary!) then an atheist (spooky!) then decided to go all-out and try McCarthyism again because it worked so darn well the first time and called Barack a Communist (terrifying!).  I would think that the Republican party could manage to cobble together enough brain cells to figure out that it’s still about the economy, stupid.  Fear don’t work so good, Vern.

Eek.  Shouldn’t have said that.  I’ll try harder.

I should be following my soon-to-be President’s advice that ripping each others throats out over our political differences is not the best way to go about it.  Maybe he’s right.  We should all be better.

Jerks.

NaNoWriMo

If there is one thing that speaks to my career choice it is that I am helplessly gripped by my passions.  No, I’m not talking about those passions, I mean the kind of passions you hope to find sometime between the day you declare your major and the time you are handed your degree.  I know too many people who are older than I and still haven’t found what drives them.  I consider myself very lucky to be paid to do the things I love.  Unfortunately for me, I catch passions like 1st graders catch colds.  I get them often and with a vengance.  But they don’t last long and then I’m bouncing off to the next thing.

Luckily for me, my wife and children are patient.  They understand (or pretend to understand) that sometimes I get swept up in my ideas and I can’t sleep/eat/make intelligible conversation until I get an idea on paper.  More often than not these wacky ideas don’t get any farther than my sketchbook but one such fantastically ridiculous idea is currently being made into a movie so that’s got to count for something.  While I don’t lack for enthusiasm, I am not known for my endurance.  I work best if I can seclude myself long enough to get my ideas fleshed out and done in one, or a very few, sittings.  I’d rather bang out a story in one short, furious session rather than pining away at something for a long period of time.  Perhaps I fear that an idea will lose it’s newness, but I get restless when I’m still working on something that is more than a few months old.

In the past 3 months I started two different novels.  One got stuck at 25,000 words when I realized I couldn’t finish it without either making an idiot out of my reader or delving into some serious research.  As you probably guessed, research really isn’t my thing.  So, I moved to novel #2.   Currently, it’s at just under 20,000 words and I still love the book so, you know, that’s thrilling.  And I don’t have to research anything which is another bonus.  And it’s now three days into National Novel Writing Month!  Granted, I started this book months ago so I think I disqualified myself but at least I have hordes of eager writers typing happily away at their manuscripts to motivate me.  Go team!

So I am officially participating in NaNoWriMo.  I’m going to bend the rules on my behalf to include December as part of my writing package since my novel is going to be about twice the length of your usual NaNoWriMo book.  And I’m not going to be releasing it publicly when I’m done.  I know, stingy me.  But I actually want to sell my book so I’ll be selfish.  And I probably won’t feel too bad about it even if I don’t get my official “I wrote a novel in 30 days and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirt, then so be it.

The plan?  Write like crazy while my current novel is still haunting me and before I am possessed with the brilliant idea to write a  romantic teenage vampire story.  Who would read that kind of stuff anyway?

Working stiff

It must be hard for Frankenstein. It’s difficult enough for him to find a sports coat in his size, and with the market the way it is there’s just not much of a demand for monsters, freaks of nature and abominations. He’s been considering dusting off his resume’ but he knows he won’t pass the background test. Poor guy. Here he is after a day working at the an investment bank, the last place on earth where you can squeeze the life out of people and still call it a hard days work.

Happy Halloween!

Church sketches

For those of you who have wondered what on earth those Mormon’s do in church for three hours every Sunday, I have an answer.

More urban sketching coming soon.

Family sketches

Two quick sketches:  One of my sister-in-law that I did over pie.  The second is of my older son making an emotional appeal to his father for more screen time.

Work sketches

It’s been far too long since I posted anything from the sketchbook.  Here’s a few from work that shall remain nameless.  These are fun to do and well-intentioned (I promise!).  I hope to do a caricature of people I work with so I never have to dash out for a going away gift.  This is just practice.

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God called. He wants his name back.

Continuing in her role as an endless fountain of brainless drivel, Sarah Palin uttered some nonsense this week that I couldn’t leave alone.  Secularism is one of those things that riles me to no end.  It’s like sand in my shoes, I just have to get it out.

Here’s a quote from Governor Palin who appeared on Focus on the Family.  She was asked if she was discouraged by recent polls showing the McCain Palin ticket was less popular than the new Knight Rider.

“And it also strengthens my faith, because I’m going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God’s hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4. So I’m not discouraged at all.”

Let me start out by saying that I am a very religious person.  Some prefer to call me a religious nut, and that’s fine.  But there is an increasingly annoying precedent that many politicians take about how much they think God is on their side.

Back to the quote.  Sarah Palin either believes only God’s endorsed candidate can get elected or she believes that the Almighty himself is going to perpetuate some kind of massive voter fraud on behalf of the righteous Republicans.  Will she still believe this if Obama wins?  Does that mean he is God’s candidate?

As far as I know, God isn’t into voter fraud.  In fact, I’m pretty sure he isn’t even registered to vote this year.  Unless she’s having visions, I think it would be in Sarah Palin’s best interest to leave God’s will out of the election process.  From what I understand about God I don’t think he’d be too thrilled with any politician being presumptuous enough to call themselves his spokesman, no matter what side of the aisle they are from.

One of the tenants of my faith is that God granted us agency, or the ability to make decisions for ourselves.  To me, that means we get to make our own decisions, no matter how stupid, and we get to deal with the consequences, from simple things like what cereal we eat to the more pressing issues, like what self-important windbag gets to lead our country for the next 4 years.

God hasn’t appeared in any campaign commercials or announced his endorsement this year.  He hasn’t been to any fundraisers and he doesn’t have a ‘Country First’ bumper sticker.  I think it is more than a little arrogant for Sarah Palin to assume that God himself has chosen her.  We are so quick to criticize countries that restrict the rights of their people because of religious dictates (ie Saudi Arabia) but too many Americans are all to eager to have a person in office who will act and preside as if they themselves are the Lord’s representative.

Personally, I think we have a secular country for a good reason: government messes up 100% of anything it is involved in.  Why do that to Christianity?

Here’s another, from the AP:

Palin said the campaign had to have faith that its message will be heard “minus the filter of the mainstream media.”

“That filter has to be erased,” she said. “So we have to have faith in the wisdom of the people that they’ll understand what our message is. But even bigger that then, I have to have that faith that God is going to help us get that message out there.”

God is campaigning for McCain/Palin?  She thinks that the ‘mainstream media’ is trying to thwart God’s message?  Grrr.  As both a journalist and a person of faith I find this both insipid and insulting.  Using righteousness as a campaign tacticis a dangerous thing to do.  I’ll not get into the pro-life/pro-choice idiocy now (another day, perhaps) but I will assume that Governor Palin is sure of God’s support because of her political stance on exactly one issue.  Is being pro-life the only thing a person has to be in order to receive God’s blessing as a candidate?  Doesn’t anything else matter?  Like war?

I am just a little tired of politicians using religion to scare people into voting.  Unless he shows up at campaign HQ, leave God out of it.