Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Right now I’ve got a foot in three jobs.  The job I have, natch.  Plus putting the finishing touches on an academic career with a conference coming up on Saturday as well as looking for a new job, which includes attending talks, making phone calls, submitting resumes, taking a day off for interviews (Thursday) and on and on.

Oh, and I have a two-month old kid and we’re trying to move this summer (though so far that last thing is completely owned by My Baby, which is freaking amazing considering she’s carrying the bulk of that kid thing, too).

By now you recognize this as one of those all-too-frequent I’m-going-away-for-a-while posts.  I hate these.  It’s like admitting failure.  But hopefully when you hear from me next I’ll be done with my academic career, have my feet under me on my current job, and have a new job lined up.  Because I still have three J-mez CD’s to get through along with about 12 of my own.  Plus Mike Patton put out an album a few weeks ago and Melvins’ new one is out tomorrow.  So you know I’ll be back.

Guy In Office: [something about his kid]
Me: How old is your kid?
Guy: Eight months
Me: Oh, mine’s eight days.
Guy: Wow, congratulations.  I can’t believe you’re back at work already.  [short pause] Actually, no, I totally get it.

…and introduces a new character.  Please welcome, The Boy, pretty much a blatant rip-off of Twins Geek’s name for his son, I know.  Born Thursday night, here he is, at 4.5 days old, doing his best Tommie Smith impression.

Me: I don’t feel like a father yet.  I just feel like me with a lot more to-dos.
My Baby: Yeah, I think that’s fatherhood.
Me: Okay, then I feel like a father.
My Baby: But I know what you mean, I don’t feel like a mother, I just feel like I have this new thing I’m really into.
Me: So it’s like me when I got Rock Band.
My Baby: Yeah, I think so.

For those of you interested, which should be all of you, in the outcome of the pick-a-CD-for-fetus task I was assigned by My Baby, I have the results.

I didn’t make it through the 80 CDs I had picked out.  The deadline buzzer rang as I was about in the I’s.  And even then I couldn’t settle on just one, giving My Baby no fewer than three: one jazz, one classical, and one pop/rock.  The winners are…

Bach: Brandeburg Concertos 4, 5, & 6 (thanks uncle J-mez for Our Baby’s first gift!)
Miles Davis: Kind Of Blue
Beth Orton: Trailer Park, which got me through the last couple of days of thesis writing, so it was front of mind.

I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t end up with a male vocalist in there, but the kid’s got plenty of time for that, I suppose.  Besides, if she’s anything like her dad (don’t read too much into that, I don’t know the sex and we’re pretending it’s a girl this month), she’ll take an instant liking to them anyway.

The kid’s a regular music critic, already strongly preferring Bach to Miles Davis, My Baby reports.  I love that the kid’s right.  I mean, Miles Davis is great, but I’m not sure I’d put any musician in front of Bach.  Besides, the Davis and Orton CDs are definitely intended to be the sleepy-time CDs and, apparently, Bach will now be how she gets her exercise.

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)