The sweet, sweet taste of drudgery

In which your humble narrator escapes from the children in order to think about things and grade terrible papers.

On Tuesdays, our super-awesome liberal-arts college, Wisconsinite, baby-sitter comes to the house to care for the children for three whole hours so that I can escape the occasionally mind-numbing drudgery of house-husbandry/child rearage. Not that I don't love Child #1 and Child #2 with an easy intensity, but stunningly scintillating conversationalists they are not.

When I was younger, freer and stupider I had lots and lots of time to goof off. And so I did, with wild abandon. Bear with me now here. You may be expecting an "I'm so-o-o-o busy raising my w-o-o-o-nderful children" type diatribe about how "difficult life is with kids... blah-de-blah... no one understands my woes" type of lament. And if you're wincing in anticipation already, rest easy, gentle reader. I wouldn't do that to you. In fact, anyone who bitches about how busy they are more than once a month should be condemned to hard labor on a chain gang overseen by Carrot Top.

Here's the secret: people that stay home with their little children aren't busy, they're bored. But it sounds really lousy to complain about how boring your kids are. After all, most Evil Mommies and Evil Daddies will go on and on about how wonderfully expressive and interesting little Logan and Gwyneth are if you give them the slightest prompting. But they're not. Kids are great, especially mine... but it's not like I make it a point to be friends with small children (Sprechen sie creepy? Yah!). Their worlds are constrained, they aren't very funny, and you can't go to a bar with them to hang out and shoot the shit*.

Babies need attention. Not stimulation, not educational activities, not enrichment, attention. And they need it constantly. And you have to give it to them, which means you can't read a book or a magazine or watch anything besides Finding Nemo or Thomas the Tank Engine or Curious George on television, or mess around on Facebook or cook something interesting, or even grade the crappy papers of crappy undergraduates. You're tethered to a little child's universe and you have to commit to it. And if you don't, your children will grow up to be serial killers or republicans or Woody Allen.

So even though my brief stretch of freedom (spent on the couch at my Mom's) is going to be consumed by grading truly horrible papers and writing one rambling blog post, it's totally worth it. Plus I haven't had to change a diaper in almost three hours.

* Have you noticed an uptick in profanity in this post? Do you think it might be related to being away from the children? Explain your reasoning using correct grammar and punctuation.

People will send you bunches of paper in the mail with words and pictures and stuff

In which your humble narrator wrests back his money from a conniving purveyor of magazines and encourages you to waste the time of of your corporate oppressors.


I realize that magazines and newspapers are old hat and that a person in my demographic should eschew them in favor of a strict info-diet of web news aggregators and the blogs and what not, but I love magazines. Also, I'm just not willing to take the laptop with me to the potty.

I've loved magazines since I was a wee child with subscriptions to Highlights and Cricket. I've subscribed to initial issues and I've seen many a good magazine through until their untimely deaths, but yesterday I canceled two subscriptions. We have this evil credit card that I just paid off. After many months of throwing all of our extra money at the account, last month we got it down to 0, nada, nothing, zilch. So I open the e-statement yesterday to discover a new balance of $49. The charge was for a 1-year renewal to the Atlantic.* So since there was a subscription card in my last issue for $28 for a year, I called to get a lower rate. I called the number on the credit card statement but was connected with some automated clearinghouse system which asked me first if I wanted English or Spanish. Then the Automated Computer "Lady" asked me if I wanted to push buttons or use the voice system. Buttons, baby! I'm trying to do this while caring for my loud offspring.

But as soon as I push the button corresponding to "cancel this mother and give me my money" (since there was no option to talk to an actual person) I got switched over to the voice system which promptly got all confused when I closed the microwave door to make a bottle for the baby.


Me (and microwave door): Slam.
Automated Computer "Lady": I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. 
Me: That's because it was a microwave door slamming you, vile computer wench.

Automated Computer "Lady": I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Me: Yo' Mama was a programmable toaster.
Automated Computer "Lady": Your new subscriptions to Tiger Beat, Golf Digest, and Ladies' Home Journal have been processed. Your credit card will be billed $8000.

I finally persevered. Magazines were successfully canceled, but only after I had to listed to three "special offers" to continue my subscription. And then I had to do the who thing again for magazine #2. The whole stupid phone call lasted 12 minutes. And people wonder why everyone is so crabby all the time. It's little, evil  things like automated phone trees and telemarketers that make people go slowly insane. I like to cope with this indignity by pretending to be an old person whenever I deal with customer service or telemarketers. Once you get a real person on the line, turn off your brain. Just keep saying "can you explain that again?" After stringing along a telephone sales rep for 40 minutes, ask them to mail you some materials so you can think about it some more. You'll feel as giddy as a school girl when you start thinking about how much of their time you've wasted for a change.


*Formerly the Atlantic Monthly, but a year or two ago they decided that the "monthly" part made them sound old and fuddy-duddy like "Hieronymous  Q. Staffordshire's Monthly Compendium of News both Politick and Cultural for the Enlightened Burgher."