we had dinner over the weekend with another american couple who has been in new zealand for a year. they are heading home next saturday but instead of feeling jealous, i feel sorry for them…

on the way home from kindyhouse yesterday ethan starting telling me about a kid he decided he doesn’t like anymore. when i asked him why, he responded:

“**** yells mean things and hurts people and laughs.”

i agreed that wasn’t going to win a lot of friends. ethan went on to say:

“**** says his dad is better than my dad.”

so playground terrorism apparently starts around five. before responding, i wanted to see if ethan understood the slight and asked what he thought that meant. he responded:

“**** thinks that i don’t have a good dad and that his dad is a better dad.”

ok, he gets it. i doubt you’d find this in the writings of dr spock but the first thing that came to my mind was:

“that’s ridiculous. there isn’t an objective measure to determine who has a better dad. i’m sure **** loves his dad and thinks he’s the best dad just like you love me and think i’m a good dad”

ethan seemed happy with that response and said he was going to tell **** he is ridiculous the next time he says that. so we’ll have to see how that goes.

and while i believe its only partially true there are no objective measures of a good parent, on at least this count, i can tell ****’s parents

“my son is better than your son.”

i may be raising expectations by coming through with two answers on trivia night…

is a balloon lighter or heavier when inflated with air?

which musical features the song ‘matchmaker, matchmaker’?

natalie and i were talking over the weekend about medical testing and how there are times when your worse off for having had it done.

first, there are a number of therapies that do a better job of reducing quality of life than increasing life expectancy.

second, the abundance of testing and transferring of patients between specialists means that important information can get lost in a shuffle or someone else’s heap.

third, knowing your ‘supposed’ risk of something seems to be even less reliable than betting vegas odds.

we just found out there is fragile x marker in the family and that would have greatly tempered any enthusiasm i had for even having kids not to mention the monumental stress it would have caused all through pregnancy.

so that baseball sized lump on the side of my head, i don’t think i’ll be having that checked…

somehow i got to be forty years old.

and spare me the ‘your still young’ remarks because i have a four and twenty three year old in the house who take great joy in telling me that i’m old…

for me, the two most significant obstacles in completing college were usenet and muds. i’d be slightly embarrassed admitting this publicly but i doubt many people even know what either is.

i have a correction to yesterday’s post. any and all teams from texas are on the list to root against. in fact, it would be nice if more of texas were on the coast so the probability would be greater of losing it in the rising tides of global warming…

in the current era of free agents and the near continuous trading of professional athletes a friend of mine has concluded there is no point in rooting for the home team since its going to look a lot like the neighbor’s team next year anyway. so he says root for your favorite players wherever they happen to end up and i’ve partially adopted this philosophy (especially since i seem to move with the frequently as a veteran free agent) with the exception of the yankees, duke, patriots, cowboys and raiders which i choose to despise regardless of who plays for them (though ironically enough, these teams do an amazing job of attracting the players i also dislike so it works out even better).

so, congratulations to boston on winning the nba championship. regardless of everyone else on the court i was rooting my distaste for kobe bryant and can therefore say my team won.

remember this?

still no response, i’m thinking about giving up hope.

commenting on the ‘staycation’

…paris will always be there, but judging from the sub-prime mortgage crisis chances are your house won’t.

-john hodgman, 2008-06-11 daily show

unreadable text:
you stand alone, ten plates in the hole. it’s you versus the weight. you’re thinking, “i’m gonna get friggin’ crushed” you’re thinking,”i’m not gonna get up”. but, you will. yeah, you’ll puke. yeah, it’ll be hard getting off the crapper the next couple days. but it’ll be worth it, cuz when there’s chalk on your hands and sweat on your back, there’s no better place in the world. this is pain. this is animal. can you handle it?

caution

stop exercising if you feel pain,
lightheaded, or short of breath.

i have to say i’m quite confused about how to properly behave given these vastly different recommendations at the gym…