Merry Christmas to You and Yours, from Me and Mine

A Rare Subversive Plug

You probably suspected as much, but among all of our friends, I’m considered a stylish trendsetter of sorts. A tastemaker par excellence. I was wearing shoes like “TOMS” back in 2000, well before the company's founder could even distinguish between Madonna and Evita Peron. (Nevermind that I referred to them as French peasant shoes or that I think they first belonged to an 80 year old woman before I acquired them secondhand. I consider these pesky, inconsequential details.) And Smart cars? I drove a hybrid one to my senior prom.

So it should come as no surprise that, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting urgent, almost frantic e-mails, phone calls, and unexpected visits from throngs of acquaintances who want to know what they should get their loved ones for Christmas. “What’s the next big thing, Sean?” . . . that’s the common refrain. Well, since I’m a busy man and need to save the hassle of interacting with all you plebes, I’m just going to post the inside info here so you’ll stop harassing me and wasting my time: treasure hunting is where it’s at. You heard me right – metal detectors are the next hot gadget fad. I've recently seen hordes of hipsters roaming the parks and street medians throughout the five boroughs of New York with these things. And you know what that means – next stop: Your Town, USA. To sweeten the deal, word on the street is that Apple is about to come out with its own iMetalDetector, just in time for last-minute Christmas shopping.

But if you can’t afford the touch screen version, you should at least check out a beginner's model at White’s Metal detectors. Their commercials are enlightening, to say the least – never afraid to confront the key metaphysical issues of our time (albeit in a deft and amazingly subtle manner). I could give you more details about their sleek interface and cutting edge functionality, but I couldn’t do them justice. They really just sell themselves – simply listen to the convincing words of some of their owners:

"One of America's fastest growing outdoor activities" . . . http://whiteselectronics.com/content/view/4797/520/

Ohh the stories you'll tell: http://whiteselectronics.com/content/view/4560/515/

Maybe the one I cherish most.-- a frank and insightful discussion with the the President of White's: http://whiteselectronics.com/content/view/4546/481/

And in case you're hungry for more, a full-length infomercial, including interviews with real life treasure hunters!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-nqK2exnC4&feature=related

I know what else you’re wondering: Where does he find such great gift ideas? How is he ALWAYS in THE KNOW? Well, I’m typically not disposed to give away my sources, but as an early, extra-special holiday treat -- a gift from me, the prescient Blogger, to you, my feeble but faithful follower -- I will divulge this one secret: The Family Channel. Get cable, watch it for commercials if nothing else, and the rest will take care of itself. Your heart will sing with inspiration, your mind will buzz with creativity. Ohh Disney Muse! Eisner was genius!

Milk is a key ingredient in Ranch dressing. That's no coincidence.

Please read this fine article that I abridged from Gourmet.com; it's John T. Edge writing about the latest food craze that is sweeping the nation:

"I was 25 when I overdosed on ranch dressing, that kitschy combo of mayonnaise, herbs, and buttermilk or sour cream. I had eaten one too many salads of iceberg and shaved carrots, drenched in a torrent of anemic white nothingness. I had dunked a dirty barnyard of chickens into countless thimbles of blandness. Ranch was too much with me.

A decade and a half passed. I returned to the fold while seated at my father’s kitchen table. Struggling, like many a parent, to get my son to embrace the lettuce-and-cucumbers ideal, I noticed that, when my father cracked open a jar of store-bought ranch, my son dug deep into the roughage. So I followed his lead. Ranch, I learned, hadn’t gotten any better. But it seems that absence makes both the palate and the heart grow fonder.

More recently, I’ve noticed that chefs have been reacquainting themselves with ranch, too. And improving on the formula in the process. I’m not going to play the catalog-the-wild-ranch-iterations game. For that, you can consult this dispatch from Ideas in Food, or this article in Slate. And if, after perusing those pieces, you don’t recognize that ranch has made a comeback, then consider this dinner dispatch from Michael Bauer of the San Francisco Chronicle. Even the mighty Thomas Keller has embraced the possibilities: “The waiter presented the entire roasted abalone, which looked like a caramel-colored river rock. He then took it back to the kitchen where chewy/tender slices were arranged on a rectangular plate with a swipe of French Laundry Ranch dressing, a scattering of sea beans and bright orbs of peeled cherry tomatoes.”

On the other coast, my gourmet.com editor Christy Harrison raves about the ranch at “The Farm on Adderley, a place in Brooklyn that does the whole local-seasonal thing.” Closer to my home, John Currence of City Grocery, in Oxford, Mississippi, has been known to run a special of what he calls frog wings, which are, of course, frog legs, fried and doused in the manner of chicken wings, served with a side of buttermilk ranch.

Now that I’ve called it to your attention, I’m betting you’ll notice any number of ranch revivals. A couple weeks back, I sampled what may well be the best. I was at Cakes & Ale, a relatively new restaurant in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Okra, sliced longways, fried to a shattering crispness, [was] served, yes, with a bullet of buttermilk ranch that reminded me, somehow, of a decidedly American riff on Greek tsatsiki dressing. "

Since he is somewhat underwhelmed by Ranch, I can't say that Mr. Edge and I see eye-to-eye on this particular subject. It's no secret that I'm an unashamedly devout Ranch consumer. (And with good reason: some notable New Testament scholars have confirmed that, if the water into wine thing didn't work out for Jesus, he was going to try to turn water into Ranch dressing next.)

But note that Edge updated his verdict on Ranch dressing (only slightly) after eating the store-bought, jarred variety. What's wrong with this man? For purists among us, that's nothing short of a shock and an outrage! You can't judge a dressing by its store-bought simulation! He really needs to exercise better judgment in the future.

Moving on to what all this has to do with my daughter/revolutionary . . . As a father, am I supposed to think that mere chance can explain this phenomenon: milk, the main staple for an infant, is also the main ingredient for Ranch dressing? What one man calls chance, I call fate. So here's what I'm proposing to my wife as soon as she gets back from the gym tonight: as we prepare every bottle of milk for our new daughter, we start by adding a few healthy tablespoons of mayonnaise and a few generous dashes of Ranch seasoning. Voila -- a diet fit for a Titan.

Viewed in that light, mother's milk seems like a paltry source of nutrition for a kid to live on day after day after day. Why not add some minerals and protein and make it Ranch? The kid loses nothing; she only stands to win.

We already had three X chromosomes between us, what will another two in the house hurt?

You've probably heard, but a few weeks ago, we found out that we're expecting a girl. A cute, adorable, baby girl.

The Mother Lode

After recently posting the entry about my Birth Plan, I had to pause for some sincere and elaborate reflection on my own birth.

I only wish I could remember the first 24 hours after I began to exit the womb, but too many hard narcotics were involved. They hooked up Mom to some sort of intravenous drip, and very soon thereafter, I was hopped up on drugs, way too high to remember anything but the scantest of details. Naked, blood shot eyes, fidgety, face covered in my own slobber – but all of a sudden, I was surrounded by bright lights and masked/bespectacled people, and I was wailing at the hallucinatory and disorienting new reality. Was I a human in its larva stage, or a caterpillar dreaming to be a infant? Either way, it was not a gratifying scene . . . one of my grimmest, most desperate days to date.

But here’s the worst part: it was a c-section, so I wasn’t really “born.” There wasn't much "birthing" involved at all; more than anything, I guess I was extracted. It was like the hospital staff went on a mining expedition. (After all, in Waco in the 1980s, I think the doctors at the hospital actually were coal miners working the night shift for extra beer money. At some point, I’m pretty sure I received a swift blow to the temple from a pick axe.)

Forcefully (and surgically) divorced from the ceremonious passage into the world that most other humans experience, I was stripped of my dignity, left to question my very humanity. If I were perfectly honest, there are days when I’m still not sure that I truly, completely exist after not having been born. I’ve been coerced into this limbo, forever stuck in a weird hybrid anti-reality that I can only describe as somewhat similar to purgatory. In some ways, there can be no more grave a human rights abuse than preventing someone the right to be born, not allowed to fully experience the very process of becoming human.

I wish I could tell you that the drama ended there, but after my so-called “birth”, matters have only deteriorated. As it turns out, just because you’re delivered by a “Caesarean” procedure, that doesn’t mean you’re going to grow up to go gallivanting around in chariots, nor can you (legally) conquer/pillage Gaullist towns, and perhaps worst of all, you can’t even prance around sporting a laurel of gold-plated olive branches on your head. (Trust me, I’ve tried them all, and not once has the line “but I was delivered by Caesarean section” been received as an acceptable excuse). You can imagine how the whole shocking disappointment has taken some real adjustment, most of all for my mother, who was expecting her own Tirolean villa by now.

Yet another impressive success for public-private partnerships

I've been thinking about human nutrition and what to feed my child. A question to all you parents out there: as long as it's organic, can large quantities of high fructose corn syrup be beneficial for our system?

Rural-Urban Migration

I just got back from Atlanta, and I have to say, I admire Urban Meyer. I actually don’t know anything about the man. But what more do you need to know about someone with such a great first name? In fact, I’m thinking about naming our baby Urban. What I like most is how the name speaks of sophistication, high culture, and avant garde creativity. Perhaps we could achieve a similar effect if we went with a name like “Downtown,” but in that case, wouldn't the kid feel too much pressure to be a Hall of Fame center in the NBA, or at the very least, a respectable R&B musician? Come to think of it, maybe names like Urban or Downtown are a little too high-falutin for my humble, East Texas roots. Just so there won’t be any undue pressure on his/her character development, we could always name our first child Rural Sims . . . then, as long as s/he’s literate, we’ll be happy.

But why stop at “Rural”? What really struck me about the name Urban was how bold his parents must have been to pick a name like that for their child. Who needs conventional names like John and Peter when there’s a grab bag of names to choose from in the social sciences. This is why, in addition to Urban and Rural, I’m also considering Industrial Sims, Deviant Sims, Ethnocentric Sims, or my personal favorite, Gesellschaft Sims – all of these are perfectly suitable names for a kid.

There’s one other avenue I haven’t explored yet: maybe the parents of Urban Meyer had no interest in the secular academic route – maybe they opted for something more spiritual . . . as I see it, they easily could’ve named their kid after Pope Urban VIII. (In a previous post, I referred to our child as a future Nobel laureate. But why shoot so low? Why hope for a master of the arts or sciences when you can expect your child to be a master of divine communication?) So I’ve changed my mind, and now I really desperately hope our kid grows up to be Pope one day. With that in mind, I need to start considering names; like the Meyers must have done at one point 40 or 50 years ago, I’ve narrowed it down to a shortlist:

First, there’s obviously Benedict. But Benedict is way, WAY too popular right now (I just saw a book of papal baby names in Barnes and Noble the other day, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s at the top of the list again this year.). So I’m going to have to go much further back to find a unique one. Not to give it away prematurely, but Gelasius (AD 492-496) is currently at the top of the list. I can’t explain why – Gelasius Sims just has such a good ring to it. But there’s also Innocent (AD 401-417) or Boniface (AD 418-422) which are both very popular pope names, used over and over . . . which worries me in itself: maybe they’d be a little too commonplace. I think Simplicius (AD 468-483) is another good one, but I’m pretty sure an aspiring rapper by the same name once approached me in a Target parking lot in Houston and sold me his mixtape. There’s Hyginus (AD 136-140), but I’m afraid a kid by that name would be much too likely to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. On the the other hand, something tells me OCD is a prime qualification for the papacy. I don’t know – that’s just a hunch. The only other ones on my shortlist are Pius (AD 140 – 155) and Hilarius (AD 460-468), but both of those seem a little too hard to live up to.

The Birth Plan

Today, I’m troubled. We’re somewhere between 15 and 32 weeks along, but my wife has yet to develop a detailed and comprehensive birth plan. (The Birth Plan!, as it’s called in the prenatal dimension). I’m worried. This thing could happen any day now and she’s not prepared. But I’m gradually coming to accept this; in lieu of her birth plan, I’m going to go ahead and create my own.

For the unitiated, The Birth Plan is important because – let’s face it – the day of my first child’s birth is going to be a very special time that will hold a place in my heart for years to come; and like any other parent, I want to make sure I’ve let all those around me know my expectations so they can help make it as heartwarming and meaningful for me as possible. Here are my requirements:

1. No screaming or loud noises. I can’t explain to you how much I hate noise pollution. I need to be calm (to a zen-like degree, really) to fully appreciate this experience. If someone’s yelling, or groaning, or huffing and puffing – well, not only will that be extremely insensitive – but that sort of nonsense will distract me from the beauty of the experience. I don’t want to be distracted from the beauty of the experience.


2. Absolutely no blood or bodily fluids of any sort. I’m squeamish – I can’t help it, it’s just part of my composition. This could be my one and only chance to experience such a succinct transcendence of my mortality – the survival and triumphant prolonging of my genetic code . . . How can I be expected to fully appreciate it when it looks like there’s been a massacre in the place? There's a good reason gangland warfare and serene reflection don’t go hand in hand . . . and if I faint and miss the delivery, that’s really going to suck. Big time.


3. Unlimited supplies of humanely raised, pan-seared foie gras. Nothing says "Celebration!" like overfed fowl liver. I’m especially insistent on this point in particular. A selection of nice cheeses wouldn’t be a bad touch either. Moreover, if this thing lasts more than an hour or so, I know I'm going to get pretty hungry. I wonder if there's any way to relocate at the last minute, maybe to a nice restaurant, based on whatever I'm hungry for at the time. That's not a bad idea to include in my birth plan, but I'll have to give it some more thought.


4. Annual passes to Schlitterbahn. This is a moment we’ll each want to relive, over and over.

"Go West, and catalog all the flora and fauna."

That's roughly what Jefferson had to say to his henchmen Lewis and Clark. I paraphrased, but that's how I remember learning about the expedition in elementary school.

Which brings me to the key reason I didn’t like our first (and only) visit to the hospital. Even though the nurse who gave us a tour was a very nice and pleasant lady, and even though I might have been the only one to notice, there were a couple of gaffes on her part. First of all, she was explaining some kind of ointment or medication they smear all of the baby immediately after s/he’s born. That’s perfectly acceptable, of course. But in her explanation of this medical procedure, she said that it was b/c the baby is exposed to various “flora and fauna” as it escapes the human compost bin it has been living in for 9 or so months. “Flora and fauna”? Was the exotic language really necessary? Did she have to get 19th century on us? I’m all for manners and polite, educational discussion, but that just gave me some messed up imagery. Now, I’m (justifiably) concerned that my kid’s going to get attacked by antelope right as s/he’s being born, or at least stumble over some poisonous cactus on the way out. That would be awful. At this stage, we're just going to have to cross our fingers that Sacagawea shows up as our midwife, in which case it should be smooth sailing.

Point of concern number two. The nurse kept referring to our kid as “Baby.” Not “the baby” or “your baby,” but just “Baby”. "When Baby is born, Baby gets a security band wrapped around its wrist . . . when Baby is coming out, the umbilical chord could get wrapped around Baby's neck." There were other people on the tour, and it didn’t seem to affect them at all. As far as I’m concerned, though, this is seriously poor form on her part. Has she seen Dirty Dancing? I don’t know about the other parents who were on the tour, but Patrick Swayze is the last person I want to imagine my young, impressionable child in a relationship with. Not to mention that any references to movies with sub-plots involving abortion is just not appropriate for the Labor and Delivery area of a hospital. I guess I’m lucky she didn't make subtle allusions to Cider House Rules.

10/15/2008: Let's talk babies and daffodils.

We're pregnant, and I'm overjoyed. I don't know about Jenny, but yesterday was one of my best days of being pregnant yet. We lounged around the house and basked in the bright, perfect elegance of our life to come. We daydreamed about how lovely our child would be. Isn’t it going to be great to be a parent? “Yes, indeed! Yes, indeed!” We exclaimed, over and over, in a trance-like state, nearly reaching ecstatic tears in our energetic and abundant happiness . . . to know that this little, harmless creature depends on you to meet its every need? How I can’t wait for him/her to see the light of day, this fair and sunny world with so much wonder and glee!

Proto-Socialism

Several weeks ago, I had the most meaningful experience of my adult life . . . I sunk my teeth into a flour-dusted ciabatta sandwich, lightly coated with dijon mustard but generously stuffed with soft-boiled eggs, prosciutto, caramelized onions, fig preserves, and a creamy, melted local cheese. I washed it down with a mango iced tea-lemonade mix garnished with mint. It made me reconsider my place in the world, my connection to the universe. Have I just taken a step in a dramatically different direction in life? Is my existential purpose profoundly altered? Do we have time for me to order another sandwich?

A couple weeks before that we had gone to the Austin Area Birthing Center. For some complicated feminine reasons that would bore you I'm sure, as they did me at the time, the midwife couldn't locate the kid's heartbeat with some glorified microphone she was rubbing around my wife's stomach, seconds after mysteriously coating it with gooey junk. This is called the Doppler device, and although we couldn't hear our baby's heartbeat with it, we did manage to forecast a frightful band of thunderstorms, with large hail and tornadic activity, heading south from Waco. (Naturally, I rushed out of the room and urged everyone to take cover if they knew what's good for them.)

So next, they had to roll in the high-tech machinery. I could feel the cancer cells in my brain multiplying as the midwife turned the thing on and the windows and walls went into a low-frequency buzz. Thankfully, she pointed the device away from me and directly at my unborn child. Doubly thankfully, we got this crystal clear image of our future Nobel laureate immersed in a gross biological liquid of some sort. It's going to really suck when they can broadcast these images in high-definition ("HD" -- I have to spell it out for all you earth freaks and stone-age losers. Suckers!).

But here's the really amusing thing . . . the little bugger, s/he's already plotting revolution. Isn't that so sweet?

Henry

Have you ever seen a cuter, more adorable expression? With any luck, our kid will come out with this sort of neck beard. Unless it's a girl, in which case I think I've seen some germane infomercials lately.

DIATRIBE: To our detriment, society has imposed the most cruel and impractical beard styles on men. If we could only, as a people, reinstitute the neck beard, that would be a huge break-through in civil liberties.

The Birth of a Revolution

Some say blogs are bourgeois, WAY too mainstream for smarmy sophisticates such as myself. But No! I have found my inspiration! In this revolutionary endeavor, I hope to radically and fundamentally alter the structure of global (universal!) society. Every man, woman, child in utero, extra-terrestrial creature shall breathe the fresh, life-giving air of "liberte, egalite, and another, more gender-neutral 'ite' than the French originally iterated." [Where do they put the accents on these confounded machines anyway?] I have my sights set on justice.

All the amateur psychologists will think "He's clearly doing this because he wants to deflect attention from his unborn child and attract more attention for himself." Well, if you briefly can ignore the fact that these naysayers clearly don't have their sights set on justice, I will point out that I'm wowed and humbled by their insight. To that end, I also would add that this a seminal moment: it is the very first time that I consciously (or maybe I should say "explicitly") superimpose my dreams onto the embryonic ambitions of my child. (At this point, I think most of his/her ambitions are ridiculously myopic and self-serving, so to be honest, s/he could really use some guidance and direction). Maybe someday s/he will become the Post-Marxist subversive I always wanted to be.

By the way, I haven't even published this first post yet, and I'm already getting lots and lots of fan mail, or as we Blogonauts of the Blogosphere say, "Comments." This isn't scientific, but so far, I'd have to say the most common question is, "Why is your blog pink?" . . . "Are you a woman? Are you expecting a girl?" -- those are some typical follow-up hypotheses.

The answer is simple yet mysterious and elusive: Because pink is a lighter shade of red. The answer is also "alluring" and "quixotic." Or if the answer isn't quixotic, surely something about this post must be quixotic. Maybe I just realized that chances to use vocabulary like "quixotic" are rare, like Indonesian leopard cubs, and you must seize them whenever possible.

Until next time . . . Toodles! :) :) :) XOXOXO