In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.
It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."
Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.
If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.
What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.
Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
This weekend I did not die
In which your humble narrator describes the horrors of code compliance and the likelihood that it will kill you in your sleep.
I almost never die on the weekend, and this past one was no exception, but it I did come closer to death than usual.
Regular readers (hi to all three of you!) will remember my water heater woes from a few weeks back in which we learned that we needed to have an expensive metal liner shoved down our chimney for many hundreds of dollars, so that we would not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Last Thursday, after most of the coldest, wettest October in Minnesota that I can remember had passed, the chimney guy (I'll call him "Ron" because that's his name) came with his chimney helper (I refrained from referring to him as the "elf.") to put in the new liner. They worked for about three hours, finished up and went away. Hooray!
Then it warmed up, which was nice. So the furnace didn't really run Friday or Saturday. Then it got cold again, and since we don't like freezing it started kicking on Sunday. Everybody was sort of crabby and disagreeable all day. I had a headache that wouldn't go away, even though it never threatened to blossom into migraine-awfulness. It was just sort of a crappy day all the way around.
Then on Monday I woke up with a headache again. I went down to the basement to start one of 37 loads of laundry that needs to be done weekly and noticed that the basement was humid, smelly and was making me feel woozy. Also, the furnace was overheating and blowing stinky air out of the intake vent. Then I went outside and noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney. Then I turned the furnace off and opened a lot of windows and called Ron. Ron was there within a half an hour, and seemed more freaked out than I was. I sort of assume basic human decency coupled with visions of lawsuits danced in his head. I figured that since we hadn't already expired that we were probably all good at this point.
Anyway, he fixed it within about 3 hours. (Which is when my headache went away too!) Apparently a piece of the new liner came loose and blocked the furnace exhaust entrance to the flue, causing the furnace to backdraft into the house.
I'd just like to point out that the old, non-code-compliant, ostensibly dangerous chimney liner never tried to kill us all in our sleep.
I almost never die on the weekend, and this past one was no exception, but it I did come closer to death than usual.
Regular readers (hi to all three of you!) will remember my water heater woes from a few weeks back in which we learned that we needed to have an expensive metal liner shoved down our chimney for many hundreds of dollars, so that we would not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Last Thursday, after most of the coldest, wettest October in Minnesota that I can remember had passed, the chimney guy (I'll call him "Ron" because that's his name) came with his chimney helper (I refrained from referring to him as the "elf.") to put in the new liner. They worked for about three hours, finished up and went away. Hooray!
Then it warmed up, which was nice. So the furnace didn't really run Friday or Saturday. Then it got cold again, and since we don't like freezing it started kicking on Sunday. Everybody was sort of crabby and disagreeable all day. I had a headache that wouldn't go away, even though it never threatened to blossom into migraine-awfulness. It was just sort of a crappy day all the way around.
Then on Monday I woke up with a headache again. I went down to the basement to start one of 37 loads of laundry that needs to be done weekly and noticed that the basement was humid, smelly and was making me feel woozy. Also, the furnace was overheating and blowing stinky air out of the intake vent. Then I went outside and noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney. Then I turned the furnace off and opened a lot of windows and called Ron. Ron was there within a half an hour, and seemed more freaked out than I was. I sort of assume basic human decency coupled with visions of lawsuits danced in his head. I figured that since we hadn't already expired that we were probably all good at this point.
Anyway, he fixed it within about 3 hours. (Which is when my headache went away too!) Apparently a piece of the new liner came loose and blocked the furnace exhaust entrance to the flue, causing the furnace to backdraft into the house.
I'd just like to point out that the old, non-code-compliant, ostensibly dangerous chimney liner never tried to kill us all in our sleep.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Five Things I Hate Today
In which your humble narrator enumerates five things from the past week which which have caused him much consternation.
1. Mothers who mousse their toddler's hair. And I'm talking about toddler boys. Last week at the big Mall I overheard an Evil Mommy: "Cody! Don't touch your hair! You're messing it up!"
2. The Jay Leno Show
3. The bizarre propensity of undergraduates to avoid the preposition "on" in favor of "off of." Thus, "based on" becomes "based off of." Why would you replace a perfectly good preposition with two?
4. The anti-vaccine crazies
5. Public Radio Pledge Drives
1. Mothers who mousse their toddler's hair. And I'm talking about toddler boys. Last week at the big Mall I overheard an Evil Mommy: "Cody! Don't touch your hair! You're messing it up!"
2. The Jay Leno Show
3. The bizarre propensity of undergraduates to avoid the preposition "on" in favor of "off of." Thus, "based on" becomes "based off of." Why would you replace a perfectly good preposition with two?
4. The anti-vaccine crazies
5. Public Radio Pledge Drives
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The High Tide of Stupid
In which your humble narrator rambles incoherently about babies and fantasy phone calls and sink drains and then compares himself to a popular television program from late in the previous century.
Child #2 was sleeping through the night three weeks ago. I'm pretty sure she was. I vaguely remember being able to engage in logical processing. For a week now she's been completely weird at night. She wakes up every two hours. She thinks it's time to get up for the day at 4:00 a.m. She cries in her sleep without waking up.
All of these charming idiosyncrasies of slumber have led to me not having more than three hours of uninterrupted sleep in about a week. And the stupid is taking over my brain. I've become clumsy. I cut my finger on a vegetable peeler. I keep spending the day worrying about returning phone calls that I received in my dreams. Also, I keep starting weird projects with a feverish urgency. Today, I unstopped the slow-draining upstairs bathroom sink with a bent bobby pin, a coat hanger and a baby bath tub. Child #1 watched from outside the door, looking at me like I was completely nuts. Maybe. Or maybe I'm MacGyver. Or maybe I need a nap.
Child #2 was sleeping through the night three weeks ago. I'm pretty sure she was. I vaguely remember being able to engage in logical processing. For a week now she's been completely weird at night. She wakes up every two hours. She thinks it's time to get up for the day at 4:00 a.m. She cries in her sleep without waking up.
All of these charming idiosyncrasies of slumber have led to me not having more than three hours of uninterrupted sleep in about a week. And the stupid is taking over my brain. I've become clumsy. I cut my finger on a vegetable peeler. I keep spending the day worrying about returning phone calls that I received in my dreams. Also, I keep starting weird projects with a feverish urgency. Today, I unstopped the slow-draining upstairs bathroom sink with a bent bobby pin, a coat hanger and a baby bath tub. Child #1 watched from outside the door, looking at me like I was completely nuts. Maybe. Or maybe I'm MacGyver. Or maybe I need a nap.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Say it ain't so, Sven
In which your humble narrator pleads with Swedes to undo their misdeeds.
Yesterday, Wife and Sister-of-me accompanied me and the children to our local IKEA for some super-cheap breakfast and crazy-fun time playing on the furniture displays. For those of you who do not have small children and don't live on the frozen tundra I should explain that when the cold winds of winter begin to blow in October, house husbands, like your humble narrator, become desperate for something to do to get out of the house with the offspring. IKEA serves as our own personal indoor playground for the snowy/rainy/freezy months.
I frequently drag some relation out to breakfast at the IKEA once a month or so. It has child-friendly, bland food and a family of 4 can have breakfast for less than $8.00. And as long as you're cool with the bus-loads (literally) of developmentally disabled folks that have also discovered this happenin' breakfast spot it's a good way to kill a morning. The food is not so great. They eggs have a distinctly industrial color and freakishly uniform texture. The bacon is more like the ghost of bacon. But the potatoes... well those were good. (Cue ominous music.)
Child #1 has been a big fan of the potatoes at breakfast. Tasty, finger sized cubes of potatoey goodness perfect for dippin' in ketchup. (Or as Child #1 says: Topatoes in Chup.) But the potatoes have changed. Not longer are they perfect little bite-sized cubes. Now the potatoes are a part of some un-Godly frozen vegetable hash with the following components: tiny greasy onion bits, microscopic red bell pepper fragments, green bean bits, itty-bitty carrot strings and unidentifiable yellow things (in IKEA-speak: "Weyrdyelobitz*").
So, please Overlords of Crappy Swedish Cafeteria Breakfast, change the damn potatoes back! I can't handle this sort of change.
*There should be an umlaut in here somewhere but I can't figure out how to make blogger do that. Please imagine it over the vowel of your choice. Hell, imagine two of 'em. I won't judge.
Yesterday, Wife and Sister-of-me accompanied me and the children to our local IKEA for some super-cheap breakfast and crazy-fun time playing on the furniture displays. For those of you who do not have small children and don't live on the frozen tundra I should explain that when the cold winds of winter begin to blow in October, house husbands, like your humble narrator, become desperate for something to do to get out of the house with the offspring. IKEA serves as our own personal indoor playground for the snowy/rainy/freezy months.
I frequently drag some relation out to breakfast at the IKEA once a month or so. It has child-friendly, bland food and a family of 4 can have breakfast for less than $8.00. And as long as you're cool with the bus-loads (literally) of developmentally disabled folks that have also discovered this happenin' breakfast spot it's a good way to kill a morning. The food is not so great. They eggs have a distinctly industrial color and freakishly uniform texture. The bacon is more like the ghost of bacon. But the potatoes... well those were good. (Cue ominous music.)
Child #1 has been a big fan of the potatoes at breakfast. Tasty, finger sized cubes of potatoey goodness perfect for dippin' in ketchup. (Or as Child #1 says: Topatoes in Chup.) But the potatoes have changed. Not longer are they perfect little bite-sized cubes. Now the potatoes are a part of some un-Godly frozen vegetable hash with the following components: tiny greasy onion bits, microscopic red bell pepper fragments, green bean bits, itty-bitty carrot strings and unidentifiable yellow things (in IKEA-speak: "Weyrdyelobitz*").
So, please Overlords of Crappy Swedish Cafeteria Breakfast, change the damn potatoes back! I can't handle this sort of change.
*There should be an umlaut in here somewhere but I can't figure out how to make blogger do that. Please imagine it over the vowel of your choice. Hell, imagine two of 'em. I won't judge.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
My Kingdom for Some Earplugs
In which your humble narrator wishes that the damnable flying machines would cease flying over his home.
This is a good representation of what the upward view from our house looks like every 3-4 minutes right now. The Metropolitan Airports Commission is reconstructing one of the parallel runways at the airport which means that they're using the transverse runway (which they normally never do) all the time. The transverse runway points pretty much directly at our house.
So until October 30, (or whenever they actually finish this project) we get to add constant jet noise to the near constant Ethel Merman impression that Child #2 is cultivating.
This morning I dreamed that I woke up with cotton stuffed deep into my ears and had no idea how it had gotten there. Do you suppose that means something?
This is a good representation of what the upward view from our house looks like every 3-4 minutes right now. The Metropolitan Airports Commission is reconstructing one of the parallel runways at the airport which means that they're using the transverse runway (which they normally never do) all the time. The transverse runway points pretty much directly at our house.
So until October 30, (or whenever they actually finish this project) we get to add constant jet noise to the near constant Ethel Merman impression that Child #2 is cultivating.
This morning I dreamed that I woke up with cotton stuffed deep into my ears and had no idea how it had gotten there. Do you suppose that means something?
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