Big Daddy Paul

We attended a fundraiser for Malcolm’s school last weekend. The big entertainment for the evening was a magician.  I am afraid of magicians (like some people are afraid of clowns) and I really didn’t want to go.  The good folks at the school had the wisdom to have a wine tasting at the event, so we ended up attending the event.  I had to turn my back to the stage during the show, and the squeals from the kids were like little daggers in my ears, but we had a mostly good time.

We ordered a lot of wine, so they decided to drop off the wine at the school for pickup yesterday.  I have never been so excited to pick up Malcolm at school!  It is really a no brainer, combine school related events with alcohol and you will find that parents suddenly have a reason to participate (other than caring about the future welfare of their kids.)   I was so excited by the idea, that I dreamt up ways of capitalizing on this idea.

1. Hold PTA meetings at bars.  I have never been to a PTA meeting, but who wouldn’t want to go to a bar?  I imagine that PTA meetings are held in the library and are very quiet, causing people to be nervous and for disagreements to be quite uncomfortable.  A cool bar with kickin’ music and super snacks would cut through the nervous energy at such events, and would allow people to freely express their feelings about the educational process.  As the drinks continued to pour, people would get in contentious fights and begin screaming at each other at the top of their lungs while AC DC played in the background.  At a bar, you can scream at somebody and threaten to remove their skull, and then hug it out when you get outside thebar.  At a library, not so much.  Also, people hook up at bars and is there a better way for people in the PTA to get to know each other than hooking up at a bar?

2. Wine bar at the library.  If you want to increase patronage at your local library, open some zinfandel!  It is a perfect pairing with all things literary.  Granted, beer or hard liquor at the library seems rather pedestrian, but wine seems like a nice fit.  There would, however, have to be pretty tough limits on how much each parent could drink: you can’t have wasted readers shouting at the library.

3. Beer at little league and soccer games.  They are sporting events, beer should be served.

4. Do parent-teacher conferences at a restaurant.  Parents barely know the person who is perhaps most responsible for their child’s development over a year.  Get to know them! Don’t do it at a lame conference at night sitting in a desk designed for someone one-third the size of you.  Go out and enjoy yourselves.  Have a cocktail, drink some wine, get a little loosie goosie! Before long the teacher will tell you who the real assholes in the school are and which parents are the worst.  Actually, I don’t want to do this last one.  I fear that the answers may be Malcolm and me, respectively, especially if people find out that I am the guy bringing beer to the little league game.

Amy has her annual “Oracle Shuts Down San Francisco Conference” this week.  We dropped her off at BART this morning,and we will not be seeing her til thursday.  She will be hanging with the movers and shakers, dining at fantastic events, and otherwise being very grownup (until she has a third cocktail.)

Malcolm and I will be having quite a different experience.  We’ll start it off tonight by watching the football game.  If Amy were around, they would talk to each other in an enriching way and play some games which develop his ever expanding intellect.  Malcolm and I, on the other hand, will stare at grown men bludgeoning the snot out of each other, and do it in virtual silence.  I could tell him that the game is a battle of good versus evil, but with the Jets playing the Dolphins, what story could I possibly tell?

We will be eating a steady diet of crap while Amy is gone.  I have a hard time cooking anything too exciting when Amy is gone, so Malcolm and I will make do on mounds of macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, and dessert from bakesale betty’s.  I have tried to make gourmet healthy food for just the two of us, but every time I have, the meal has ended in tears (from both of us! I get really upset when people don’t like my cooking.) I am not sure who is going to get more out of the week, as I don’t often get to treat myself to kids’ food regularly.

Malcolm will also look a lot more disheveled at school this week.  I am kind of a slob myself, and dress like it is my duty to protect the world against my devilish good looks.  Amy dresses Malcolm a lot and usually cares that Malcolm’s clothes, A) are clean and B) match, while I generally let Malcolm dress himself and pat myself on the back every time I get him out of the house with A) pants on and B) a shirt on.  Malcolm’s teachers will definitely be able to realize that I have sole Malcolm duty this week.

With Amy gone, my wine consumption will plummet, too.  We consider wine to be a contributing member of our marriage, and without her there, drinking wine feels like cheating. I know that she will be cheating, as her evenings will be spent drinking fabulous wines at expensive restaurants.  I like to think that I am a better man than that, so I will not be cheating on her.  I will drink beer.  Wait a minute, beer and macaroni and cheese with a football game on?  I hope she goes out of town for a month!

I am going to Reno this weekend.  My friend, Derek, is an avid University of Missouri fan, and I, along with some of his other friends, are going up to watch the Tigers play the University of Nevada, Reno at football.  This sounds like a perfect opportunity to blow off steam with a weekend with the boys, but I am a bit worried.

The guys I am going with are quite successful in the business world.  They are all upper level executives at successful companies, with nice houses and cars that probably don’t smell like old sandwiches.  They wear clean clothes, shower every day, and are polite to one another.  That is what has me worried. 
When I go to Reno with my normal crew, I tend to get just a tad out of control.  When there, you will normally find me with a beer in my dirty little hands, a cigarette dangling out of my mouth, and I am constantly making up reasons to take the next shot.  And that is all before breakfast.  I like to yell at the dealers, do squats around the tables, and if you see me order food that doesn’t start with “chicken fried” then something is wrong.  One time, I got an entire blackjack table to rub their nipples every time the dealer busted.  I am concerned that I will not be able to control the beast within, and the others will have to ask Derek, “Why is your friend doing shots at the bar with that old Chinese woman?”  It’s gonna be tough.

The other potential pratfall will be the blackjack tables.  The tables, along with AC Transit buses, are one of the last few places where you can see democracy in action.  When sitting at the tables for hours with random strangers, you tend to talk about who you are and what you do.  I can foresee going around the table with everyone else talking about their impressive responsibilities and the movers and shakers they have in their contact list.  And then all eyes will fall on me.  Being a stay at home dad is great, but it is not the kind of awe inspiring profession that lends itself to impressing the general public.  In anticipation of the blank stares that I normally get, I will tell people, “I’m in derivatives.”  If forced to, I will eventually disclose that this means that I wipe Malcolm’s constantly running nose and that I sponge off of my wife, but I am hoping that I won’t have to.

I am going to approach the weekend like this: I am going to ignore my initial inclination.  I will not be going to the strip club with a bag of cocaine and $1,000.  I will think about it more closely and go to dinner with the boys.  My pants and shirt will stay on at all times in the casino.  I will channel my proclivity for taking off my clothes by simply leaving my fly unzipped.  If someone makes fun of me for being a stay at home parent, I will buy them a drink instead of spilling one on them.  It’s gonna be hard, because when I start drinking, it takes me approximately 1 second between when I think of something and when I start doing it.  Wich me luck!

Malcolm is a spirited little boy, and, if left to his own devices, he would spend his entire day eating chocolate, hitting people with bats, and calling me a “stupid noodle head.”  To combat his tendencies, we have a variety of rules.  If he violates the rules, he gets in trouble, ranging from going to his room to not getting to watch his favorite TV show, Little Bear.  He is a habitual rule violator, and suffers the consequences every time he does.

I think I know where he gets it from, because today, at my stay at home dad’s group, I broke a lot of rules.  The first rule we broke was the rule, announced by a large number of large signs around, that no alcohol was allowed at the park.  We get this now and again at parks that do not want large groups of men sitting around drinking beer all day.  Somehow, we have it in our heads that the people that made these rules would see things differently if the large groups of men sitting around drinking beer all day had kids with them.  So, we ignore the rule, and are prepared to argue that many sections of Oakland’s Municipal Code do not apply to stay-at-home dads.  Besides, the alternative to us sitting around drinking beer is for us to sit around and talk about our feelings, and goodness knows that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

The second rule I broke was eating polish sausages that were past their expiration date.  I question any expiration date for hot dogs, as, in my humble opinion, lips and assholes will never go bad.  Also, the package said that they were “best by” September 5, and we cautiously accepted the fact that we were eating sausages that were not at their best.  When I say “we,” I mean me and one other guy, as the rest of the group was sensible enough to stick to food that was not considered rotten by the rest of the world.  (The other guy, Darren, and I decided to call each other tonight to check up on each other to make sure that we had not been done in by the spoiled weenies.)

The last rule I broke was self-imposed.  I ate some chips.  I am getting kind of chubby, so I have laid a rule down (for myself) to not eat any chips.  In the past few months, every picture that I am in looks like I am carrying Malcolm’s unborn sibling, so I am trying to stick to fruit at dad’s group.  This is quite difficult, for, if you haven’t noticed, potato chips look quite tasty.  Today, after a couple handfuls of cantaloupe and watermelon, I began cramming potato chips down my piehole like they were going out of style.  I stopped the chip parade only when the spoiled polish sausages came off the grill.  (I don’t think that I am any better off for it, but at least I didn’t put the chips in the bun with the weenie.)  I am anticipating that pictures for the next few weeks will look like we are having twins.

The question is, what punishment do I deserve?  I decided to give myself the punishment that Malcolm always gets.  I am not going to watch Little Bear today.  I don’t really mind, though; Monday Night Football is on tonight.  Now, the question is what to do with all those leftover polish sausages…