Delay

Our son has a two-hour school delay today due to the extreme cold. I didn’t even think about it so I’m glad I found out before I left work yesterday so I could bring my laptop home and go in late today. There’s no practical reason for him to stay home since I drive him the two blocks to school, so he’d be inside no matter what. But it does make sense to have a delay today since you have to do it for the whole school district and a lot of kids do take the bus and not everybody can afford a coat.

However, I’m hoping I won’t roll my eyes too much this winter at school closures. If we get a lot of snow, I understand disruption. It will be when everything shuts down because of an overnight dusting that I get annoyed. Like I said, we live two blocks from school and I’m pretty sure that with 28 years’ experience driving and a 25-mile commute, I can make it down the street without spinning out of control and bursting into flames. We are lucky that our jobs have flexibility but a lot of parents don’t have that and I would feel bad for people who are in the doghouse at work for leaving early because everyone’s panicking in a dusting of snow.

Of course, I don’t envy the superintendents who have to make these calls. They’re damned if they close and damned if they don’t, and if they make the wrong decision, they’ll have parents calling for their heads at the next school board meeting.

My annoyance just continues my longtime attitude toward snow and mocking people who put their heads in the oven when we get a coating. It’s funny: When I was a kid, I would laugh at people freaking out at a few inches, and adults would tell me, “Wait until you have to go to work; then you’ll know what it’s like.” Decades after entering the workforce, it still just doesn’t bother me to drive in the snow (the traffic kills me, but the snow has no effect on me unless it’s literally a blizzard). Now that I’m a parent, I still have the “walk it off” attitude and probably will not be shrieking “STAY SAFE!!!” at the school buses.

The weather doesn’t bother me but what I have anxiety over (and I have much anxiety over many things) is those little unforeseen disruptions to the school schedule. Even before we adopted, I was nervous about how we would handle school drop-off and pick-up, what we would do if we were late, what if we have to leave work to pick him up right now and we’re an hour away, etc. Not to mention what to do in the summer. There is a lot of devil in those little details and now I know why parents get stressed about it.

I worry about the big things, too, like educating our son, raising a good person, helping him through any trauma that might arise with the adoption, preparing him to face racism, and all the other Big Issues that come up in parenthood. But that stuff is more ongoing in the background and doesn’t keep me up at night—little scheduling things do. Is anyone else like this or am I just a weird person with strange priorities?

Excuse me, I just have a question

Oh, you just have a question? That’s all you have? Well, then feel free to step right in front of me, the first person in line, and address the cashier. You don’t even need to ask my permission or look at me; just barge right in.

This line is not for questions. All the statements from those of us in line will be declarative, not interrogative, sentences. There’s no sign indicating it but people with questions get to skip ahead of everyone. It would be grossly unfair for you to have to get in line, waiting behind people who have been standing here for quite some time to make purchases. No, you go ahead. We’ll wait.

Of course, it’s never just a question, is it? It always turns into more. You ask one question and then I can see your posture sort of relax a little, as if you’re settling in for several minutes of back and forth between you and the cashier. All of which is more important than what the rest of us are doing by several orders of magnitude.

Meanwhile, I’ll just wait here, with a purchase that would have probably taken less time than the question, or series of questions, you have. It’s fine.

Granted, most people, when asked nicely, will let someone ahead of them if they say they’ll only take a second. I’m fine if people ask. But there’s no need for you to do that. You’re special and exempt from the universal social contract that indicates that when you see a line, the place for you is at the back. You have that big, brash personality that everyone loves, so nobody minds waiting while you push ahead and ignore them. You do you. YOLO. FOMO.

But if some assertive peon behind you ever corrects you, ever says, “Excuse me, I was next,” you just whirl around and glare at that person in put-upon astonishment, because to a rude person, the only thing ruder than rudeness is calling out that rudeness.

Pro Tip: Eat Cake

Government shutdown got you down? Forced to work without pay while hoping your pocket lint will pay the mortgage? Eating free ramen from the food bank?

Well, never fear, for I’ve come down from Mount Olympus to deign to tell all the little people how to cope with missing a second paycheck. Here are some pro tips:

·      If you’re running low on food, remember that not every meal has to be gourmet; sometimes they can be leftover gourmet. Michelin three-star restaurants are notoriously picky about the freshness of food, so they’re always throwing out perfectly good produce, meats or desserts. Just use your connections to contact Daniel Humm and Brian Lockwood at Eleven Madison Park. I’m sure they’ll be happy to give you some day-old soufflé or coq au vin.

·      Is your mortgage company or landlord really on your case about paying for housing? Just take out a loan. Surely you have a luxury car or vacation home you can use as collateral to get a loan and a few thousand more in liquidity.

·      There are always things around the house that you can sell to earn more money. Most homes have artworks by de Kooning or Matisse that they’re not really using. Just call an auction house and you’ll have more than enough money. After the shutdown ends, you can always use your back pay to buy back the artwork.

·      You must have an impressive collection of luxury clothing and accessories. Rent out that Birkin bag to some aspiring fashionista and you’ll pick up a ton of extra cash. Sure, you’ll have to slum it with that spare bag from JC Penney, but that might be fun.

·      Ask one of the servants to lend you some insulin to get you through the day.

I’m glad I could help!

Split

Hey, let’s split a dessert! Doesn’t that sound like fun? We can each get half of something!

Pick something! A rich piece of cheesecake with strawberries, some warm apple pie, a scoop of salted caramel ice cream, smooth yet crunchy crème brûlée, flourless chocolate torte, a variety of fresh fruits, etc. I’m not picky, as long as I get to pick off your plate.

I know you were looking forward to eating an entire piece of cake that is optimized to be one serving for one person, which is entirely reasonable, but I’m not hungry enough to eat an entire serving of dessert. What I am hungry enough to do is take half of what you have. No, I won’t order my own and eat as much as I can and take the rest home. What kind of fun would that be?

“Waiter! One piece of cake, two forks!” Now that’s fun!

Besides, sharing is caring, remember? One might argue this applies to sharing with people who are truly needy, not sharing with people who can damn well afford an entire $7 piece of pie, but that wouldn’t be convenient for me, so I’m disregarding that argument.

If we split something, I walk away full and you may or may not still be hungry. It’s win/lose. Doesn’t that sound like fun (for me)?

The Slowest Photocopier

I have a hard time dealing with slow people. They really test my patience. I’m not talking about the elderly or people who have physical or mental limitations that make them slow; those people are fine. They can’t go any faster, and I understand that. I’m talking about the people who can go faster but won’t. These are the people who “live life at their own pace.” There’s nothing wrong with this when you’re not impeding anybody. But when there’s traffic stacking up behind you, either literally or figuratively, that’s when the concept of common courtesy kicks in and you need to get on it, since you’re not an island. These are the people who walk shoulder to shoulder down a busy hallway and when someone behind them brusquely says “excuse me,” they whirl about in wonder, just astounded that they’re not the only people in the airport. These are the people who chug along at 50 in the left lane at rush hour with drivers passing them on the right and wondering “how anyone can be so angry on such a beautiful day.” I remember in college, I went to the library to have some pages of a book photocopied for an assignment. I got the slowest librarian in the world to do it. (I don’t know why I couldn’t just copy it myself. Maybe it’s because I was just an undergrad and didn’t have a library science degree and was unqualified to Xerox.) Anyway, I was very late for somewhere I had to be but this woman (she was not old) was copying at a tortoise-like pace while my professor just chatted with her aimlessly. This librarian would turn the page of the book, smooth it out meticulously, place it on the copier with all the care that one would handle a Fabergé egg, and ceremoniously press the copy button. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and I really have to go. And she’s just chugging along. I wanted to grab a dictionary from the shelves and show her the meaning of the word “expedite.” I wonder if she’s still there 25 years later, trying real hard to get that book photocopied.

Crabby

Our son likes crabs so a few weeks ago, we went to Chickie and Pete’s so he could eat some. There was a slight snag: He wasn’t sure how to crack open the claws so we had to show him how. Given that one dad is vegetarian and the other dad really doesn’t like shellfish, this quickly devolved into a comedy routine. What the hell did we know about eating crabs?

I have just never liked crabs. Crab might be OK—like if it’s meat served to me in crab cake form or something, and I can’t get out of eating it in a social situation, I might eat it. A crab is not OK, not even a little. The thought of cracking open crab claws and prying out the meat just repels me. If someone insisted I crack open a crab, I would call whatever emergency hotline allows you to quickly convert to Orthodox Judaism so I could get out of it. (I’m also not too hot on shrimp or lobster.)

I looked at the menu for Chickie and Pete’s, with a picture of a big pile of crabs with all their gag little heads and gulp claws and stuff and I thought, “That’s not food.” Enjoy these crustaceans if you want but I just … no. I can’t.

I did a little claw cracking but Steve did most of the work, winning Father of the Year as a vegetarian showing his son how to tear apart a crustacean. He grabbed the claws, touching those little hukk hukk hukk bumps or whatever are all over them and used that metal thingie to break the legs waaaaauuuugh and expose the meat and that little piece of bleaarrrggh white tendon or whatever.

At least he didn’t order those whole crabs, the kind where you have to crack open the head HUUUAAAAAGGGHHHH to get the meat out.

The good thing is, he ate all the crabs. We weren’t sure how much he would eat and it’s not like the two of us would eat the leftovers. So it wasn’t $20-something wasted. Plus, my wings were delicious!