Just as an aside or a disclaimer about this post, lately I've had a lot of free time. That free time has allowed me to think about some stuff. I'm feeling particularly thoughtful today so I'm going to blog about it. Also, it's really fucking hot out and I hate AC. My bedroom is a veritable sweat lodge right now. I'm pretty much in a Hogan, on a spirit quest, looking for my power animal due to loss of electrolytes, so bear with me. (Update: I've ascertained the identity of my spirit animal. He's an Albanian Conversophile who goes by the name of Itsabairan. His power word is "Twat". Power move? Oh a little dash o' this, and a little dash o' that.)
Back to lying. As I mentioned, I've been thinking. And listening to techno. One of the things I've been thinking about is the meaning of words. Words like "nice", "lie" and "selfish". I'm starting to get a real bee in my fedora about the word "nice". I think "nice" people are actually incredibly "selfish", because they "lie". Oh shut up and allow me to explain. One of the ways in which we attribute meaning to a particular word is by looking at the connotation society has projected onto it and that which it describes. I don't know the origin of the word "nice", and if you try to work it backwards and extrapolate the meaning of the word by looking at that which it describes you get totally fucking lost because the word "nice" is used to describe things that run the gamut from the taste of wine to the experience of taking a shit. (I'm not looking in the dictionary for this on either. Those things are for hippies.) I know there's a town in France called Nice. Maybe the word "nice" comes from Nice where a group of guys got together and were talking about the girls in their town. "That cheek Sofie. She told me zat my beret looked good, and she bought me a baguette but she's totally fucking boreeing. I can't call her a beetch because she does nice sings for me, but I don't think she ees all zat great. Oh zee Nice girls. What word can we use to describe zem?" Nowadays when you think of someone nice (or at least when I think of someone nice) it's someone who tells you what you want to hear and doesn't call you out an any of your bullshit. Basically someone who "lies". Now somewhere along the line the word "lie" got a bad rap. Lies aren't always "bad". (There's another word that makes me itchy. Bad. So fucking arbitrary.) When we lie we're coming up with a scenario that is more comfortable for ourself or others than reality. Reality and honesty are hard and they fucking suck and we do what we have to do to make sure our lives aren't TOO hard and don't suck TOO much. We all had to come up with a million lies to get through the formative years of our lives. Mine was the marriage of Claire and Heathcliff Huxtable. When I found out about Ahmad Rashad I was shattered. SHATTERED. We lie every day. How many times have you said "Excuse me" when you meant "Get the fucking fuck out of my way, fat ass". Now, you said the former rather than the latter because you didn't want to hurt the other person with your actual response to their in-the-way-ness. You weren't really asking for that person to excuse you. That was a lie. You didn't want to raise a fuss, or get into a whole thing about how this fucking bitch brought her four-wheel drive SUV stroller onto the subway at 9am on a Wednesday and you're already totally fucking late to this bullshit meeting that you forgot you had and don't care about. In effect you were being "selfish" because you don't rreeeally care about hurting the other person's feelings because you in fact said "Excuse me." with venomous hatred while jamming your laptop case into her back. You were more protecting yourself from an awkward situation. But again, the word "selfish" has a bad rep. "Self" and "ish". I give an "ish" about mah "self". What the fuck is wrong with that? What's so wrong with giving ourselves a break for a minute and doing what's in our own best interest? I think a lot of problems would be solved if the word "selfish" were to be unstigmatized and people allowed themselves a little bit more "ish" for themselves. We beat the shit out of ourselves for ever thinking about what we want, so we then resent ourselves AND everyone who forces us to suppress these "selfish" thoughts and actions.
Okay, back to kids. Kids don't lie. The don't know how. They don't say "excuse me". They say "move". The don't say "you look great in that dress" they say "why does your face look like that?". They don't say "sure you can play with this" and then quietly resent the shit out of you for taking it. They say "mine". And they keep it. And they're happy. They're not trying to pretzel their little personalities to fit what they think you would want them to be like most adults are. They're just being. And that's fucking terrifying. They don't do stuff to please you. At least not when they're young. That comes later. So when you ask them to do something you better fucking hope they want to do it too, otherwise you're in a world of hurt. If they don't want to put back to box of tampons which they deftly plucked from the Feminine Hygiene aisle you're going to have to figure out how to make them want to or everyone in the store is going to see that you suck at this, and your whole fragile armour of lies and ego is going to crack wide open.
One of the hardest things about dealing with kids is getting them to do the basics: Eat, shit, bathe, sleep. All the other stuff is kind of extraneous. When you can't get a little kid to eat, you start to get into a semi-scary, pre-survival situation. There are a lot of things that can happen in a day that I can give myself a break about fucking up. If I can't run a marathon it's not the end of the world. Maybe I'll never get a high paying job, or any job at all. I can live with my mom. I crash my car and don't kill anyone, whatever. I can get a new car. If I can't get this fucking kid to eat he might get sick, and then Mom is going to come home and fucking kill me. When Moms think their kids are in trouble they are so fucking scary. For example, the fire alarms in my house have a habit of going off at 3am. Well the first morning they went off it was just me, Mom and kid in the house. When the alarm went off I was up just in time to see Mom scoop kid out of bed, FLY down the stairs and out the door of the house to safety. This all transpired in about 2 seconds. What I didn't mention was that she had no free hands to open the door to get out of the house because they were full of kid. She took the door of it's hinges with Mommy adrenaline. It was a screen door, but regardless. That was an amazing and terrifying thing to behold and I won't lie when I say I'm scared of Moms, this Mom in particular (Jesus, how many things am I scared of? Oh Jesus. I'm totally scared of Jesus. Beards. Apostles. Yeesh.) So when it comes to trying to get the kid to do the basics that are required for survival, you better believe that desperation is creeping into my voice as I'm looking to get this kid to eat his fucking turkey dog.
Lately he's been having some trouble sleeping. When I was first trying to get him to go to bed I didn't stress out about it too much because we all just assumed it was a developmental thing and he'd get over it. Then he started to have some problems. His moods started to be affected by tiredness, and he wasn't eating. Mom made a point to tell me to put him to bed early and make sure that he go to sleep. Um, what. How do I do that. Give me an engine block to rebuild, a knot to untie or language to learn. I'm good. I'll read the directions or whatever. Tell me that I practically have to force a little person to do something that they seemingly don't want to do? Iie, arigato. In any other instance I would try and use logic. But homeboy doesn't really get logic too well yet. He doesn't understand that the feeling of frustration and sadness that comes upon him at night mean he's tired. I don't think I even figured that out until I left NYC. You can't explain that to him and make him want to go to sleep. All he knows is that when he lays in that bed trying to go to sleep his body and his mind won't just shut off, so he thinks he's not tired. And he's frustrated so he wants to give up. But when you give up on sleep Mom gets mad and kills babysitter, so that won't do.
I talked to some people about how to remedy the situation, and the overwhelming consensus was hug therapy. You just need to hug the kid, and make him lay still and then he'll fall asleep. (Itsabairan suggests Shnapps. I'm amenable to that suggestion.)
I talked to some people about how to remedy the situation, and the overwhelming consensus was hug therapy. You just need to hug the kid, and make him lay still and then he'll fall asleep. (Itsabairan suggests Shnapps. I'm amenable to that suggestion.)
I really don't like hugging. It's a total set-up for rejection. And I HATE rejection. (Morgannnnnn...) What about when I go to hug someone and they don't want to hug me? How am I supposed to deal with that? (Not that that happens all that often. Most people like getting hugged, but you all know about what the inside of my head looks like. Spandex. Cupolas. "It's a Small World." Rejected hugs.) The idea of laying in bed with someone else's kid forcing him to allow me to extended-hug him is my personal nightmare. I started to come up with all the "lies" I had in my bag of tricks to make me feel better about feeling so scared about this. "He's not my fucking kid." "This wasn't in my job description." "I may have The Clap. I don't want him to catch it." These are all the things I was telling myself to make myself feel more comfortable about dreading doing what I had to do to help this little guy fall asleep. Then bedtime came, and Captain Refusestoshit Sir Eatsonlybacon Von Sleepsanhour is all piss n' vinegar. He wriggles around in bed for an hour and recites 64 lines from that movies "Cars". (I hate that movie. Mostly because he makes me re-watch the first 25 minutes over and over again and I can't get the weird version of "Life is a Highway" that plays during a drive-down-Route-66 montage out of my fucking head.) SO finally I'm so frustrated and scared of Mom that I just grab him and hold on for dear life. Hug rejected, crying, whining "I want Mommy", rip my heart out, fuck. But I hold on. And he starts to calm down. Before he was pushing my arms away, and then he kind of starts to grab my wrist, and then my hand. And his breathing slows down. And he's asleep holding my hand.
Okay, so you know how I hate rejection? Well here's what I'm thinking right now: The people that read this blog are used to me being funny and this is shmaltzy. I have to be funny for them to like me. I should erase this and write a funny post about Crocs. (Also I'm thinking that Disclaimer Shmaltz would be an excellent name for a sidekick to my superhero, Malidea Jones.) That's what I'm thinking right now. I'm making up lies that keep me in my safe little world that holds no fear for me. If I stay the same guarded asshole who hides behind her humor everything will be safe and I'll never have to do anything hard and everyone will like me and nobody will reject me and I may as well be fucking dead.
I told this story because it was something that I was really proud of. I know I totally overthunk the whole thing, and in the "grand scheme" getting a little kid to fall asleep by hugging him falls right in front of the guy that finally got the navel orange pyramid to stand at the Price Chopper, but I'm fucking proud of it. (See? That was my mind telling me to tell you that I understand that you guys probably don't care about this in the hopes that you won't reject me as readers. Hey, Mind? You're being kind of a dick.) I'm proud that I was finally was able to see that the lies I was making up in my head to keep myself comfortable were causing me to potentially and actually fuck stuff up. I know this is a little Tony Robbinsy or Eastern Mysticismy, but at least it's not "nice". And at least Mom didn't kill me. Yet. He was up at 5am the next morning because my cell phone alarm went off and woke him up. Oops.
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