Random Thoughts

So who ended up actually winning the whole Olympics?  I never heard.

While I’m on the subject.

Say some poor kid dismounts and stumbles forward a step, or something equally horrifying, like their foot was off an inch to the side or something. The commentators—-and you can hear them jumping out of their seats in their booth—-hop up and say (and this is an actual quote), “Ohhhhh no. That was a disaster of epic proportions!” 

Then they get all solemn and awkwardly quiet.  They don’t know what to say.  They’re stunned and at a loss for words upon witnessing this unexpected tragedy, exactly as if the girl’s just been diagnosed with something rare and incurable.
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Well first and foremost it’s because it’s six solid weeks of 24-hour-a-day events and I just can’t stay awake that long.

But aside from that, it’s just that I can’t stand the commentators.

Here is some little 17-year-old girl (12-year-old girl if she’s Chinese) who can hop up on a four-inch-wide balance beam and stretch out one of her legs and swing it back until it touches the back of her head, then hurl her body in the air and do a blindingly fast septuple somersault, backwards, so fast that all you see is a spinning indistinct blur, then, while that’s going on, twist her body first in a complete circle to the left, then two complete circles to the right (which is not possible by the way), then touch the ceiling of the stadium, pull out a pocketknife from her leotard pocket, carve her name into a rafter-—with the small blade—-still spinning, then for the descent actually slow the planet’s force of gravity down so that as she comes down she falls in slow motion, finishing up with a triple triple-lindy and half of a half-nelson, and land back on the beam gracefully on her eyelashes, which by the way she has conditioned for sixteen solid years, doing daily nine-hour exercise sessions (six-hour sessions on Christmas Day) to make them thick enough to support her body weight, without any performance-enhancing mascaras.

And she can do this more than once.

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The other day, Sherrill took our two nieces Mellany & Maryssa out for the day and somehow forced me into going to eat lunch with them.

So I got an extremely nutritious couple of hamburgers with a large Coke, which made the girls’ ridiculously tiny drink cups look even more ridiculous.  They got those regulation happy fun meal thingies.  They came with Polly Pocket toys or some crap, which I put together for them.  (Which means I snapped a little plastic door on a little plastic boxy thing for them upside-down on purpose, and then shrugged when they looked at me questioningly because it wouldn’t close right.)  And Sherrill got some McNuggets with honey sauce.

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Chapter 3
Painting the Nursery

Around halfway till time for the baby to be born, your wife will realize that at some point in the future the baby will actually no longer be inside her, and may get the idea in her head that she’ll want to Paint the Nursery in preparation for the, uh, whatdyacall it, oh yeah, blessed event. 

And not just paint it a solid color.  Oh no.  Ambitious painting projects, where you’ll paint vast cartoon murals on the wall, never mind the fact that you’re no good at painting, you can draw can’t you, it’s the same thing, and add things called borders, which apparently are just giant stickers for your wall, and construct giant dinosaurs from scrap lumber and chicken wire and paper mache and put in a Mickey Mouse-shaped skylight and other bizarre things like you see on Extreme Makeover:  Home Edition, that make you think, wow, I know eight-year-old Edwin is really excited about his room’s robot theme, but how big a hit did the house’s value take because of all the crap? 

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You know, if I were older, and I were in a band, and I were sitting around in a recording studio at $200 an hour with my eight drunk geezer buddies, I don’t think I would just spontaneously start ad libbing the words to a song about how great Viagra is.  And if I did, I don’t think my buddies would think it was hilarious and join in and play along with me and sing harmony.

At least I’d hope they wouldn’t.  I’d hope they’d have the decency to throttle the life out of me with my own guitar lead.

WHAT’LL I DO
nat king cole

what’ll I do
when you
are far away
and I’m
so blue
what’ll I do?

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Chapter 2
Caring for Your Unborn Child

Well, really, you don’t do anything. 

It’s fairly easy at this point.  The baby never comes out, not even for a little while, before it’s born.  Which is probably very reassuring to many of you.

It gets fed completely automatically, you don’t have to run a siphon down your wife’s throat and load the uterus up with hamburgers (this is a common misconception).  All you have to do is take your wife out to dinner once in a while, and that pretty much takes care of things.

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Since I have caused a baby to be spontaneously created, and since it was even easy, I now consider myself qualified to give advice about babies.   So…

Chapter 1:
HARMONY

There are three kinds of people:  Those who can sing harmony, those who can’t sing harmony but can still sing, those who can’t sing anything no matter how hard they try, and those who can count. 

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At our birthday party at my parents’ house, as I was avoiding everyone using my patented method of Playing the Piano™, my nieces Maryssa and Mellany approached Sherrill quietly.  Maryssa said to Sherrill, “You need to come with us to our office. But you’re not in trouble,” she added hastily.

Gravely they took Sherrill by the hand and led her to my dad’s office.  Maryssa filled out a nametag (a purple Post-It note) for Sherrill, with Sherrill’s name spelt correctly (since she asked Sherrill how to spell it), and got on the computer to start a patient file for Sherrill.  Then Maryssa began the task of scheduling appointments, because apparently it was going to be necessary for Sherrill to “have to come to the office every day to talk.”  

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