Ha! Husband thinks he didn’t get any gifts for Father’s Day. And here I got him this whole blog post on Blogher! Plus I did NOT get him steak knives, or a vacuum cleaner, or any other household item.
Isn’t he just the luckiest fellow?
Actually, we are lucky to have him.
Hey! This post was Editor’s Pick on BlogHer! It’s like my very own Father’s Day present.
Foosball. The only people I knew who had a foosball table were Chandler and Joey on “Friends.”
Oh, okay, I didn’t really know them know them. But they did have a foosball table.
And now I have a foosball table too.
About two months ago, before we knew we were moving, we re-arranged the boys’ shared bedroom, a shift that included moving Caleb’s legos from one side of the room to the other. His response to this shift was something like HOW CAN YOU MOVE THINGS IT’S PERFECT THE WAY IT IS NOOOOO PLEASE NO CHANGES NOOOOO PLEASE DONNNNNNNT.
You would’ve thought we were asking him to take up residence in the cupboard under the stairs but without the consolation of magic or Quidditch.
So as you might imagine, I felt a tad anxious about how our change-averse eight-year old would handle the news that we were moving.
Then in a sporting goods store, where we were buying one of the boys new soccer shoes football boots, I had a revelation. While I was paying, I saw Caleb and Liam playing with the foosball table that the store had on display. Or rather, the boys saw “foosball” but I saw a bribe an incentive: announce the move and then tell them that the new house would have room for a foosball table.
Worked like a charm. We explained that we were moving, Caleb immediately began to angle for livestock–bunnies, gerbils, guinea pigs, dogs–then we countered with the foosball table and he was sold. Wondered why we weren’t moving RIGHT AWAY.
I found a foosball table for sale on dubizzle, the UAE equivalent of Craigslist, and voila: here it is, wedged into the living room behind the couch:
Do you suppose that either Chandler or Joey ever played foosball in his underpants? That’s Caleb’s preferred uniform.
True, my living room now feels a bit like a frat boy lounge, but you know what? Foosball is wicked fun and I’m thinking that spinning all these knobs is probably good for my triceps. I do slap the ball into my own goal with alarming regularity, unfortunately, which means that I’m at the bottom of the family foosball tournament ladder.
Heh. But I practiced this week while the boys were at school and I’ve developed a little whizbang shot that works like a charm. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go kick some eight-year old ass.
We’re moving at the end of the month to what in Abu Dhabi gets called a “villa,” but by villa I don’t mean a small 18th century castle perched on the edge of a Tuscan hilltop. Instead it’s a townhouse, the second in a row of four, on a small street. Across the street? An identical row of four houses. Next street over? More identical rows of houses. It’s a bit pod-like, I have to say–and I’m sure that at some point I will walk into someone else’s house by mistake.
Although I probably wouldn’t be able to get in to my neighbor’s pod house villa because it will be locked. And by locked I mean seriously, totally locked:
I mean a whole lotta locks. These keys are the keys we received for our villapod — not the keys for the entire complex.
In our current apartment, there are doors to the living room, doors to all the bathrooms, doors to all the bedrooms, a door to the little hall that leads to the bedrooms, a door to the kitchen, a door to the little hallway that leads to the kitchen, a door to the “maid’s room” (where we keep the washing machine), and a door to the tiny bathroom connected to the maid’s room. All of those doors have locks and keys, which when we moved in, we removed and put somewhere safe. And by safe I mean I don’t know where they are.
Now we’re moving into a bigger space. More space, more doors. More doors, more locks. More locks, more keys.
I don’t know how to explain this architectural fascination with doors: why a lock on hallway doors? why a locking door on the kitchen? Am I supposed to A) have a live-in housekeeper; and B) lock her in the kitchen until dinner is ready? I don’t know how to break it to the designers, but we’re living in an era where actual privacy is impossible–and by impossible, I mean everything from the NSA kefuffle (really? The Patriot Act enabled violations of civil liberties? I’m shocked, shocked) to the fact that your most embarrassing high school moments can surface at any moment on facebook, courtesy of old enemies friends with scanners. Given that any actual privacy these days is pretty much a myth, all these keys and locks seem… quaint. Positively twentieth-century.
We will do with these keys what we did with all the keys we pulled out of the doors in this apartment: pile them in a box and put them somewhere safe. And by safe, I mean nowhere within reach of Liam, who would like nothing more than to lock his brother in some small enclosure for a month or two.
Of course, before we do anything, we have to find the key to the front door.
Here’s the thing about being a professor: your students stay roughly the same from year to year. Eighteen is eighteen is eighteen, more or less. And the same with the twenty-year olds, and with the about-to-graduates. Yes, the particularities of dreams and ambitions, talents and strengths, vary from student to student, but in a general way, youth is youth.
Yes. Youth is youth, and every term, you sail further and further from those shores. This term I realized – with something akin to horror – that I am in many instances probably older than my students’ parents.
Teaching: the only profession where you literally watch your past recede in front of your very eyes. And, at the same time, it’s one of the only jobs (perhaps besides writer for The Daily Show) where what you do all day can keep you young. Or young-ish, anyway. Watching students get excited about ideas can be contagious; their enthusiasm and interest and curiosity are better company than thinking omigod I’m almost fifty or how will we pay for college or will I ever write that damn novel or…well, you get the picture. And because these students aren’t my actual kids, I don’t have to fret (much) about whether they’re eating right, or sleeping enough (or around), or what they’ll do for the summer now that their old bedroom has been turned into a home yoga studio.
No matter how the semester has gone—whether it’s been one of those magic semesters where everything clicks, or a semester where getting through the syllabus has felt like the Bataan death march—I am always sad to see the students leave on that last day. They have been mine, in a manner of speaking, for three months, and while sometimes they take another course with me or stop by to say hello, more often they do not. It’s as if I got to see only a part of the movie, read only part of the story: I get one semester’s worth of their lives and then they go off and finish the story elsewhere.
When I was a younger teacher, I don’t think I felt such a sense of nostalgia at the end of the term, or maybe I did but I’ve forgotten that I did because see above on aging.
Wait–what were we talking about?
Oh, right. Teaching as a way of staying young. Or being reminded of being old that you’re no longer as young as you were.
Here’s a reminder from a student’s essay this term – the student was talking about a reference in Alif the Unseen to a line from a “Star Wars’ movie (the first movie–the only one that counts, in my book–from 1977): “This line is from the first “Star Wars” movie, in 1977. Although Kenobi’s Jedi trick has been part of pop culture for decades, it seems too much to expect us to know a line from a 70s movie.” *
Right. The 1970s. I guess that was ancient history, wasn’t it.
Like, totally thirty-six years ago.
Just gonna get my walker out of the closet and shuffle over here to the Betamax video projector and watch a little telly. Got some reruns of “Laverne & Shirley” I’ve been meaning to catch up on.
these are not the droids you are looking for…
*The student, by the way, wrote a wonderful paper (even if it did make me feel old as the hills, or Betamax) and got an A.
I’ve just suffered through two school projects (one for each child) that involved–god save me–glitter. Plus glue, posterboard, construction paper, some rudimentary elements of design, and a smattering of factoids gleaned from actual books (!) and that there new-fangled internet thing.
For his project, Liam needed black construction paper, which precipitated crisis #1 (there were several): The pieces of black construction paper were not the same shade of black. How could I expect him to put together a display about galaxies using a background of mismatched blacks.
The horror.
When I pointed out that the black paper–well, black and charcoal, I guess, to be precise–would be mostly covered up with images of galaxies and his various snippets of information, his disdain for my slacker ways was palpable.
He managed to rally–there was much arranging and re-arranging of images and text boxes for maximum coverage of our Pantone-related faux pas–but then there was too much glitter and then his lettering was crooked and then the glued-on text boxes started curling at the edges (glue, in this climate, is ridiculous: the humidity unsticks everything), which meant it was all ruined.
Liam lives his life in italics these days, in part because he’s a perfectionist whose vision of how things should be frequently outstrips what he can actually create. I’m well acquainted with that frustration (it happens pretty much every time I cook) and in his adjustment from vision to reality, there is much italicized gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Once he adjusts his vision, however, it’s all fine: the morning after his glitter-related crisis, he looked at his poster and said “this is really good, actually.” Those of us who were on the receiving end of the italics and the despair and the I’m going to fail may have been, hypothetically, slightly irked by this abrupt attitude shift and–purely hypothetically, of course–we might have said something wicked mature, like “we told you so.” Hypothetically.
The second glittery project was Caleb’s project about Aztecs. He loves the Aztecs because he loves their weapons: huge slingshots! long spears! poison darts! He settled himself on the couch and looked through two of his favorite books: World History and Ancient World. He typed some things into the computer, and then a few days later he roamed the internet looking for more information about warfare, food, warfare, houses, warfare, religion. And maybe a little bit more about fighting and battles. We bought a sheet of green posterboard–like the jungle, he said–and glitter glue pens. (Would it be wrong to suggest that the person who invented the glitter pen be given some kind of lifetime achievement award for figuring out how to prevent glitter spreading through the air like so many sparkly germs?)
There was some cutting, there was some gluing. He arranged his factoids in a kind of circular pattern; I suggested that perhaps some images of these various things would be a good idea. He found some images, there was more cutting, more gluing, and then the glitter pens were used to write “AZTECS” across the top. The lettering was a tad crooked and the letters he’d done in green glitter sort of blended into the green posterboard. I asked if he’d like to go over the words, and he said “nah, it looks good. I like it.” Here is one of his factoids:
It says “after sacrificing someone they might eat the left overs which is an act of cannibalism. Also chocolate was only drank by men and women drank pozolli (maize gruel). Also another thing that was popular among the Aztecs was Tortillas and casseroles. Aztecs also thought insects and bugs were a delicacy and in some parts of Mexico they still are.” This information was followed by a recipe for Aztec hot chocolate (without body parts).
Did you find that blue block text hard to read? Yep, me too. I mentioned that to Caleb, who shrugged. “I like blue,” he said.
Caleb is…not a perfectionist. I suppose this trait may prove problematic in the future (don’t ask me how I know this), but at the moment, I have to say it’s a hell of a lot easier to live with.
How did the same genetic mash-up produce two such different children? I know, I know, we’re all individuals and whatnot, but did you ever pause to think about how weird that is? It’s as if I reached into the same soup-pot and ladled out first one bowl of minestrone and then one bowl of chicken-and-stars. How does that happen? Husband, in his ever-charming fashion, points out that he is a perfectionist (albeit one who frequently loses his perfect creations in the morass of his desk) while I am, in many things, a member of the church of “good enough.” So perhaps we created one mini-him and one mini-me.
Wacky stuff, that genetics. Maybe one of my kids could make a display about it.
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