Miss Piggy Lunchbox

When I was young enough to be young and old enough to be aware of the conversation people who weren’t young enough to be young were having about my age group, I was constantly bewildered. Why did they get it so wrong? Why were they talking so assuredly about what we were like while being so inaccurate? Why were they piecing together a few trends to make blanket statements about what “kids today” were like? Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t have any resonance to the way I saw the world of my friends and me.

That sense of puzzlement will be important for me to remember for the next 20 years or so. Mind Hacks helps by seemingly interpreting the main message of The Breakfast Club directly into parent-speak.

The monologue that bookmarks The Breakfast Club, with the line “You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions”, succinctly captures how society’s view of youth changes and yet always stays the same.

For the current younger generation, the simplest terms are mostly taken from psychiatry. This will eventually change and our recurrent anxieties about the young will largely be expressed in the next most convenient definition.

As a society, we are strangely blind to the complexities of youth.

As much as I like that last line, I do have to quibble with it. Do we need to call youth complex? I’m not saying it isn’t, but what gives those old people the wisdom to call it so? Again, when I was young, I remember being completely confused hearing adults talk about how hard it was to be a teenager. Sure, I had problems, but I didn’t see my awkwardness as such nor did I attribute any of my problems to being young…it was all I knew up to that point in my life. I think a better closing line would have been to say we are blind to the properties, or experience, of youth.

The other night in childbirth preparation class, between watching explicit videos of birth and practicing breathing, my offspring got the hiccups.  It was bothering him as well as My Baby.  He’d move violently with each hiccup and thrash around after each one; My Baby attributed the secondary thrashing to him being upset by the hiccup.

But never fear, Daddy’s here.  I applied some pressure to My Baby’s abdomen with my hand and rubbed firmly and slowly.  From the minute I started rubbing his hiccups stopped and they didn’t come back.

My accelerated path to World’s Greatest Dad continues.  I’ve got this s**t down.  Bring on the teenage years.

I can’t remember why, but for some reason over Thanksgiving my mom turned on her cell phone, something she never does unless she’s on a road trip.  When she turned it on the phone made an audible alert.

Mom: Oh, somebody’s calling just as I turned it on.

Me: It’s probably just telling you you have a voice mail.

Mom: Oh.  No, wait…it says ‘new voice message.’  What does that mean?

Me: …

Mom: Is that the same as voice mail?

Me: Yes.

As My Baby pointed out, what’s odd here is that “mail” in “voice mail” is really a misnomer.  There’s nothing mail-y, in the postal service sense of the word, about receiving a voice mail.  But here they’ve tried to be more accurate in their naming and it’s only confused things.

Someday I will be old.  This fact is often presented to me in such stark ways that there is no way I could overlook it.

I’m not a Yankees fan by any means, but I kind of have a Yankees fetish.  They’re an outlier and on the successful end of the spectrum…who doesn’t appreciate that on some level?  And there’s something that just seems right about Mariano Rivera bringing the World Series to a close in the Bronx.

Anyway, this is usually right about the minute I start thinking about the next season’s Opening Day and what milestones I’ll have between now and then that will get me through the dark, cold, wet (the streets have been rivers the last two days).  This year, though, I realize that odds are very good I will be a father by the time the next Opening Day arrives.

And that’s different.

My Baby’s pregnant.  Due March 22nd.  (title reference here)