Stay-at-Home Dad Survival Guide

Get a job

Monday, 27 June 2011 23:09

The first rule of The Stay-at-home-Dad: Get a job. Fast. Anything's easier than parenting full-time.

Dish Club

Saturday, 04 June 2011 13:23

The first Rule of Dish Club – Don’t talk about Dish Club. The Second Rule of Dish Club – Don’t talk about Dish Club. The Third Rule of Dish Club – Don’t dirty dishes.

The third rule’s as unlikely to be followed as the first two (who can’t talk about Dish Club?!), so we make accommodations. The Buddha says Life is Dissatisfaction. And, Oscar Hammerstein says A fish gotta swim. Kids gotta eat. Every day. Sometimes several times a day (don’t skimp, people, this is how we get ‘em to 18). Alas, getting nothing dirty won’t happen. No matter how carefully prepared the liver and onions we’ll be forced to make Mac n’ Cheese. This means twice as many dishes. Minimize this. Sending kids to bed without supper or forcing them to eat with their hands directly from the pot remain options. However, I’ve found two paths to Dish Club Higher Consciousness. One: Embrace Dishwashing. Own it. Love it. Become one with the warm sudsy goodness of it. It’s a difficult path, which is why there’s Two: Discipline. In short, there’s no easy way to Nirvana, nothing in life’s easy (except drinking beer, but let’s stay focused here).

I’d like to offer a few tips regarding Discipline. I know, I know, you’re probably saying: “Jeff, are you really one to lecture us on ‘Discipline’?” First off, I don’t like that tone. And second, lack of discipline helps us develop workarounds. Call me a dishwashing hacker. Oh, and third, I was once a professional dishwasher. Washing pizza plates at Straw Hat isn’t exactly like cleaning a Cuisinart that chopped garlic last week, but hey, it looks good on the CV. Tips:

1. Never put a dirty plate on top of a dirty plate. This tends to dirty the bottom of the plate as well as the top increasing cleaning time up to 50%. (I am assuming in this discussion that we’re all hand-washing. There’s something suspicious about dishwashing detergent. I’m also fairly certain Jet-Dry contains some of the same chemicals in Rainex. Plus, why expend the extra energy it takes to run a dishwasher?)
2. Don’t get stray pots dirty. The corollary to this tip is put shit away. Occasionally, a tea kettle or last night’s spaghetti pot while sit on the range. Bacon frying tends to spray grease. You’re already gonna have to clean the frying pan, why unnecessarily force yourself to wipe grease off everything within the splatter zone?
3. If it takes less than a minute, clean it. I love this rule, but it’s the hardest to follow.
4. If you've got dirty dishes to do, don't dick around writing dopey blog posts about doing dishes, just do the damn dishes!

Bacon Grease - Part 4

Wednesday, 11 May 2011 16:23

I’ve been trolling the cheap meat bin at Safeway. Every once in a while you get a good cut. Just make sure to cook it quick. Which is why it’s always a good idea to have a pan of congealed pork fat lying around. I found two steaks the other day. Guess what I did. Fuckin’ A right I did. Fried those fuckers in bacon grease.

Now, I don’t want to get into the moral implications of eating animal flesh. I know they’re raised and slaughtered inhumanely, that industrial meat-making is a gross waste of grain and water and is a totally unsustainable way to feed the planet. And I know quoting Vincent Vega does not a valid argument make. Hell, I was a vegetarian for two years, myself. I have friends who are vegan.

But, you really gotta try this.

Fry steaks in bacon grease. Pull ‘em off rare and let ‘em rest. Chop an onion and while that fries in the bacon/beef grease combo to translucency, thinly slice the steaks (against the grain). Grate Swiss cheese. Chop meat. Add meat to onions. Add cheese to meat ‘til melted. Place mixture on bun with mayo and Dijon mustard.

I’m a bad man. I’m un-evolved. I’m contributing to the slow deterioration of the planet. But, I had one damn good cheesesteak.

In Praise of Uncertainty

Sunday, 08 May 2011 16:02

As a devout believer in doubt, I question everything, myself most. I’ve started this essay fourteen different times. I thought I could scribble a quick pithy bit about being a stay-at-home dad. Instead, existential angst hovers overhead, like a chopper in Abbottabad, except, you know, different.

I’m a bad stay-at-home dad. My five-year-old is upstairs taking a bath, screaming for help shampooing as I type. They say Osama bin Laden had been holed up with his kids in that moldy mansion for years. Worst Stay-at-Home Dad Ever. I’m off the hook. Perhaps. Who knows, he may have taken breaks from plotting terror to properly bathe his children. Bake cookies.

I’m an odd guy to write about work—I haven’t had a job in almost three years. They say every story has an arc like every life has a path. Except we never know when we’ve entered Act II or if we’re lost, stumbling along the wrong fucking path. Maybe we’re in sitcoms doomed to be canceled after a bad pilot, or worse picked up and put in syndication. Maybe we’re in never-ending soap operas, one drama after another with no resolution. They cancelled One Life to Live. All My Children, too.

I have two boys. And a wife. She works from home. So, technically, I’m not a true stay-at-home dad. I got backup. Traditional spheres of influence have gone out the window. The US has military bases in former Soviet Republics and dads do laundry. In our house we use the new spheres. They look more like a Venn diagram. Or an eclipse.

I used to be kind of important. I failed my way to the middle, had a million dollar budget, a team, traveled the world on someone else’s dime. Now I’m a beached white whale trying to teach two little mammals to swim on their own one day. I tell myself this is enough. Some days I’m more persuasive than others.

I don’t know how I ever assumed a role of corporate responsibility in the first place. It seemed someone made a mistake, like the producers hired an amateurish understudy based on one good audition and when the star skedaddled to Hollywood they couldn’t be fussed with hiring a professional to fill the role, figuring the play was doomed to failure anyway.

I specialize in short runs.

I can’t stop myself from saying shit like this even though it might keep me from getting such a sweet gig again. No matter. I never wanted to be doing what I had been doing in the first place. No one grows up wanting to be a PR flak. I grew up wanting to be a writer. I was a dreamer, but a problem arose. I became addicted to passive voice. And simple sentences. Fragments.

I wrote a novel and gave it to a real writer, an author, with an agent and book deals and everything. He said it had good parts. I told him, upon reflection, after I’d distanced myself from the work, that I didn’t think it was very good. He told me never to tell anyone that. He has confidence. I envy him.

Envy’s a sin. A deadly one, they say. Bertrand Russell said envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. They say happiness is a sure cure to envy. I know this because I googled “venial sins” and stole that line from some religious website.

It’s hard to be happy when you’re paralyzed by self-doubt. And you’re lazy. Being happy seems like an awful lot of work.

I went to a tradeshow once and a guest speaker (hired, apparently, as a reprieve from the relentless tedium of technology talk) spoke about training your mind to be a positive force in improving your life. Train your mind with what, I thought. Your mind? What if your mind wasn’t the kind of mind that could train itself to be positive? Could you train your mind to be the kind of mind that could train your mind to be positive?

I didn’t mind the speaker. It was, after all, intended to be a break. I spent the time writing a poem. It wasn’t a very good poem, but I’m a better bad poet than lackluster corporate shill. Again, it does me no good to say so. It’s not like I’m suddenly going to strike it rich on the bad poetry circuit so I’ll never have to beg to do unfulfilling, albeit paying, work for the rest of my life.

My son just got himself out of the bath, clothed himself and came downstairs. I’m so proud. My neglect has made him self-sufficient. He interrupted me with his reading of a Magic Treehouse book, you know, the Jack and Annie ones, the ones for third and fourth graders. Did I mention he’s five. Either he’s really frickin’ smart or I’m a great frickin’ parent. Better than Osama bin Laden, at least.

I got fired from my first PR job on a Monday. A Monday! Would it have killed them to can me on Friday so I could have enjoyed the weekend? The boss called me into his office once and said, “This sentence has five verbs in it.” Like that was a bad thing. A co-worker there claimed our job was not PR (even though PR was in the agency’s name). He said it was a “writer’s shop.” We wrote case studies for Apple and Sun. (The companies). He went on to become a real writer, working at a tech trade magazine. I sent him emails, pitches, but he never replied.

After the second PR job I got fired from, I got fired from a third. I got hired for a fourth because this was the dotcom boom and any flak with a pulse could get a job. I quit that one and joined a startup that busted in the bust six months later. Around this time I was having dinner with one of my sisters and she told me, “You have no right to be miserable.” I scrawled the words on a slip of paper, folded it, and put it in my wallet. I take it out sometimes and sometimes I smile. This is the same sister for whom I cut up some junk mail from a credit card company and made her an “Anti-Depress” card. She gave it back to me and now it’s in a box in my basement. One of these days I’m going to clean out my basement.

Sometimes I stop and wonder what the heck I’m doing here. You know, here here. There. Examples: drunk in a roomful of marketing folk wearing a nametag that read My Name Is Fred (networking inebriated is best done under an alias); or on my back under a house pulling fiberglass insulation, face to face with a dead rat; or in a boardroom on the eve of a multi-billion dollar merger correcting the press release grammar of executives and attorneys; or wandering the floor of an air conditioning factory in Tyler, Texas; or coordinating interviews during a press junket at a resort in Indonesia; or wiping someone else’s ass.

It’s all happened for a reason. Perhaps. I envy people of faith, their ability to believe with absolute certainty in something unprovable, the strength it gives them. Me, I’m agnostic. I think.

Not having a job for three years can bum a guy out. I get lugubrious. Then I say lugubrious. Lugubrious. Loo-goo-bree-uhss. It’s hard to be lugubrious when you’re saying lugubrious. Try it, I’ll wait.

See.

So, we muddle on. Dreaming we still believe in our dreams, wondering what act this is. Maybe my generation won’t get air time, like all the TV shows that were never made because there were only three networks. I relate best with people who recognize lines from The Brady Bunch.

Pork chops and apple sauce.

We’re in the middle, between the Greatest Generation and something else, between the Baby Boomers and something else, between Generation X and something else. All this generation crap is a bunch of malarkey. Maybe it’s just me. It’s always just me. Well, you. Us. You know what I mean.

Sometimes I feel like somewhere in the last decade or so the world broke. 9/11. Iraq. The Great Recession. In the midst of it all, I blinked and went from under-qualified to over-qualified, my profession changed and no one needed me anymore. Except my son. Who needs a ride to school. This is what I do, this is my life, doing my best to raise two good boys while questioning if that’s enough.

Lugubrious.