Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Two days late.  If you need the explanation, follow the links back through the years.  This year’s addition in bold.

Baby,
I promise you that I will always be the things that made you fall in love with me: honest and transparent, funny and witty, open-minded and creative, adoring.
I promise you i will never stop pampering and courting you.
I promise you will always be my muse, and I will draw daily inspiration from you.  I promise to return the favor by trying to inspire you daily.
I promise to work on being a better husband: to talk to you, to tell you what I’m feeling, and to engage in continual self-evaluation.
I promise to prioritize us, without sacrificing you or me.  I promise to always make room for us in my life, and to make sure you know when I think we need to adjust to get to the right level of us in both of our lives.
I promise to try to love the things about you that are just in your nature, such as the telltale hair monster left behind everywhere you’ve been.
I promise to make a fuss over you when you’re sick, to love you and support you and take your side when you’ve had a bad day.  I promise to listen to you tell me about your bad day and to refrain from giving you unsolicited solutions.
I promise that I will do my best to learn how we are as one, and to take into account how my mood and actions affect you.
I promise to try to recover quickly from disagreements.  I promise to do my best to stay on the high road.  And I promise to forgive and forget mistakes said and done in the heat of the moment.
I promise to be stubbornly filled with determined, creative solutions to the most gridlocked, vexing situations we encounter
I promise you that I will help you and support you to achieve your dreams.  And I promise that, with your support, I will pursue my mine as well.  I promise never to stop taking new risks and adventures with you.
I promise you physical, emotional, and mental fidelity.  I promise that you will always be my baby that i adore completely with my mind, body, and soul, and i promise to trust that you adore me as well.
I promise to be vigilant in never letting you forget that you are the most wonderful, most beautiful woman in the world.  i promise to set the husband you, as the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world, deserve, as the impossible ideal i will strive to be.
I promise to help our marriage embrace, not suffer, change big and small, and to give us room to work through changes and all that come with them.  I promise to emphasize fun and presence over precaution and safety more than is in my background, and I promise to never be hung-over on Mother’s Day.
And above all, baby, I promise to be always on your team.  And I will do my best to make our team the envy of every other team at the party of life.

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.

This is so sad.

On June 27, the exotic dancers will take one final bow. And then the Lusty Lady will close forever.

And with that Seattle loses a very colorful part of its landscape.  My Baby and I are making plans to go inside for the first and last time, as our way of thanking it for all the joy and erotic days it brought us.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about parenthood: That everything they tell you about child care is a lie.  Let’s count:

1) Babies like to be swaddled.

Holy balls is this one wrong.  If The Boy is quiet, which is almost never, being swaddled throws him into a fit.  If he’s fussy, being swaddled sends him over the edge.  There is nothing in this world that pisses off The Boy more than being swaddled.

2) Newborns sleep 16 – 18 hours a day.

Umm, try 8-10 hours and in 20-25 minute increments.  The Boy has three states: eating, screaming, and sleeping.  Sleeping doesn’t really happen, and he’s working on a way to eat and scream at the same time.  Fed, cleaned, held, whatever…you can give him everything he could possibly want, and he’s still going to tell you how pissed off he is about what was wrong a few minutes ago.  Reminds me of somebody….

3) Even in the fourth trimester, newborns interact.

Nope.  No facial mimicking, and he does not love the sound of our voices, unless he’s expressing his love by furrowing his brow and screaming at the top of his lungs.

4) You will be so focused on the baby that you will grow apart from your spouse.

Thank god this one’s wrong, too.  Now that we have a “common enemy,” My Baby and I are closer than ever.

So not only is he a huge time sink now, The Boy is retroactively wasting our time, making sure that all the time we spent in child care preparation class is completely wasted.

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.

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

A Tale Of Three Reviews

The first review lived in my head. It was based on a few listens to this CD and a conversation with My Baby. It told of how, yeah, Sinatra’s fine, but come on, folks…he didn’t even write these songs, Dean Martin’s voice was better, and all these songs really do is evoke a mood, like you should be watching some When Harry Met Sally knock-off romantic comedy, especially the in-love montage where the guy trips and falls in Central Park or they’re window shopping at Christmas and they’re so so ridiculously happy, and you know they are because Sinatra is playing over their silent antics. The real reason Sinatra is Sinatra, the review said, is not the music as much as it is the rock star persona. He had wealth, women, and both legitimate and illegitimate power, setting the archetype for the late 20th-century rock star before we even knew what rock and roll would be. The songs were the dredges of big band music, sucking all the life out of the already quick-to-be-shlocky genre and pandering to the lowest common denominator with cavity-causing string riffs. “And what’s with these liner notes?” the review concluded. “Why is this egghead drowning me in superlatives, trying to convince me that Sinatra had some kind of artistic rigor and aesthetic supremacy my ears tell me is missing?”

The second review was published almost three years ago. It starts a lot like the first review, complete with the Dean Martin comparison and attribution of Sinatra’s stardom to his aura instead of his singing. The review then went on to talk about how some of the songs on that album were pretty good…or at least that many of them had good parts.

Which brings us to the third review…this review. It starts with the first review, then merges into the second review. It doesn’t back away from anything in the first two reviews, it’s just that I’ve already said everything in those two reviews. Except, really? These are the 20 best songs you could get from eight years in the prime of this icon’s career? Gee, overrated much? But anyway, beyond the infectious melody and the Lawrence-Welk-with-good-looks schmaltz, what’s left to discuss?

Well, let’s talk songwriters. Specifically, let’s talk about the Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn songwriting team. How in the world are these guys responsible for the two worst songs on this disc as well as two of its three best? “Love And Marriage” plods with its obvious nods to the overzealous, righteous censors and arbiters of Hollywood values of the day as well as its just plain phrasal plodding. “High Hopes” suffers from the saccharine treatment as well…I think the song is a carcinogen. Its only redeeming quality is that it’s not “Love And Marriage.” Meanwhile, “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” survives its pro-marriage cornball lyrics with a grooving sax line that seems to imply you don’t have to give up the single life when you get married (wink wink) and the catchy-as-hell “Come Fly With Me” is only not a mixer because its lyrics are just too cute.

That’s it…that’s all I’ve got that’s new. Maybe in three years I’ll go through the same struggle with Sinatra. Or maybe by then I’ll have some more insight into the multiple personality mystery that is Jimmy VanHeusen. Either way, it’s probably safe for me to now say that, while I still think he’s drastically overrated, I like Sinatra, though this album (the 50’s) helps his case a lot, just by being far superior to the last Sinatra CD I reviewed (the 60’s and 70’s).

Rating:

Mixers: “(Love Is) The Tender Trap,” “Witchcraft”
Keepers: “I’ve Got The World On A String,” “Learning’ The Blues,” “You Make Me Feel So Young,” “The Lady Is A Tramp,” “Come Fly With Me”
Filed Between: The Simpsons – Songs In The Key Of Springfield and the Singles soundtrack