Alpha, I think, would do a nude scene if it was integral to the plot. But just in case I’m wrong, I waited until she left town on a business trip to post this:

Scene: Upstairs shower. [Cue famous "Psycho" violin track]

Alpha: [singing away, bare naked] “…itchy-itchy ya-ya ga-ga, voulez-vous… EEEK!”
Miguel: [Tying tie] “Oh sorry, I scare you, honey?”

It is far too easy to scare people here, at least my wife’s family. Nine times out of ten, someone shrieks when I walk into a room.

In my family, scaring each other was our primary method of communicating our affection, so you’d think I’d thrive in my present environment, but it’s just too easy.

When I was a boy, I remember my mother turning off all the lights in the house and hiding in the closet, wearing a rubber ape mask, when she knew my father would be returning from work.

Mother: “Wraah! Booga-booga!”
Father: “Jesus Christ, Marge!”

I guess we loved each other. My father also used to darken the house and make my younger siblings and me look for him. Whoever found him got to get scared.

For some reason I will never fathom, my brother and sister enjoyed being scared.

Brother: “…8, 9, 10 ready or not, here we come!”
Sister: “He headed down the hall, let’s go.”
Miguel: “Good idea! You guys go first, I’ll, uh, check here in the entry way in case he doubled back. [whistle, whistle] Hm, not in the closet. Not in the vase…”
Father: [In some distant room down the hall] “Wraah!”
Brother and sister: “EEEEK!”
Miguel: “Ah, find him, did you? I’ll just turn on the lights then…”

I am posting this today because I was reminded in an AIM conversation with Spacecheese this morning of one of the perks of being an oldest child: putting your siblings up to things. Spacecheese was wondering whether he should do something.

feralmig: sure go ahead.
feralmig: do it, space.
angrygordon: what the hell.
feralmig: “it’ll be funny”
angrygordon: hahahah
angrygordon: those quotation marks are not encouraging

When we were little, I got my brother to break all the windows in a barn by telling him birds could fly into the panes and hurt themselves. Then I got him to break out every last piece of glass, so the birds wouldn’t cut themselves on the sharp bits.

It wasn’t just a little kid phase, either. Traveling through Austria with relatives prior to my wedding here, I convinced my sister to climb a rickety trellis to a second-storey balcony at our hotel after we got locked out late one night. We’d been drinking lots of schnapps at some pizzeria [the evil midget waitress there kept bringing us doubles, whether or not we ordered].

My siblings are growing more sophisticated as they get older, but I bet I can still make them do stuff, because I am more sophisticated too. We’ll see this summer when I visit the family.

What did you do to your siblings?

Scene: Gamma’s day care place.
Little Boy: “Mom! It’s Gamma!”
Mom: “Lift your foot so I can take off your shoe, honey.”
Little Boy: “Hi, Gamma!”
Gamma: “Hi!”
Little Boy: “Is that Beta with you?”
Gamma: “Yes.”
Beta: [Editor's note: in an "ironic" tone of voice] “I’m famous.”
Little Boy: “We got here at the same time!”
Gamma: “We arrived simultaneously.”
Miguel: [???simultaneously???]
Little Boy: [???simultaneously???]

Man, the cleaning lady at the U.N. this morning had B.O., I’m telling you, she was pungent!

I suppose I would be too, if I had to clean house for the entire world.

An Austrian friend of mine lives abroad alot, due to her husband’s profession, and complaining is her default mode. The spent a year in Alabama, which all of us know is a wonderful place, and she complained about a number of things there, including the fact that the classiest restaurant far and wide was a steak house at the local mall, the lack of decent beer, a funny American attitude towards most of the finer things in life including alcoholic beverage in particular wine, the construction of American homes – including the fact that, where she was, the houses were built without rain gutters so the water just sort of flowed off the sides of the house when it rained; weather that was too hot or too cold, the fact that there was a church of one kind or another on nearly every block in town, the poor quality of schools in general and the particular fact that long division is taught differently in America than it is in Austria, and that her child’s teacher refused to accept correct results if they were arrived at using the Austrian method.

This is just a small fraction of her list, remember.

Now she is in Belgium, where all the men have pot bellies and red noses, and where the season of winter (“at least this year,” she fairly remarks) doesn’t really exist, just sort of a nasty transitional season between fall and spring, making paying for the mounting of winter tires on your car a waste of money.

And so on. Awful country, Belgium. At least if you overlook the fact that good food can be had there (I mean, Belgians invented French fries, for godssake), and most houses are built with rain gutters.

Not to mention the beer.

Teachers, nurses, medics, firemen and cops should all be paid more. We all should, of course, except maybe people like real estate developers and stock brokers and attorneys, although I have recently met some brilliant and funny lawyers who surprised me by being interesting and simply very good people. So attorneys shall be judged on a case-by-case basis, while stock brokers are still scheduled to be set out on a large iceberg and real estate developers, well, I won’t go into that.

But, in my worthless opinion, graphic designers are the coolest of the cool, on the whole. At least if they are good. There are, of course, wretched exceptions to any rule, like for instance an old roommate who, last I heard, broke out of a boring graphic design existence designing coupons for a retail chain and now designs signs for a hospital. Otherwise, though, graphic designers are cool.

That would actually be what I would study if I were a young guy again. I used to think being a carpenter would be the coolest job, because I love the smell of cut lumber and I love hammering nails and building things. But I have an unfortunate tendency to maim myself with power tools.

Who do you think is cool?

If you win a gold medal, you are a hero. If a building falls on you, or you pull someone out of a burning car or a river swollen by torrential rains, you are a hero, even if you are just doing your job.

But I’m thinking about other heroes who every day, at great danger or cost to themselves, care for someone else. People who give a shit when they don’t really have to, people who care when they would have a good excuse to do less.

Being a good parent is hard for anyone. I have two daughters, so I know this. How anyone can be a single parent and not fucking die is beyond my comprehension. So single parents are my personal heroes. I stayed home with a baby while my wife worked. There is nothing more soul-killing than that. The lack of sleep alone kills you, yet I had a devoted wife doing more than her share. I got so tired I almost (accidentally) burned down the house. I got so depressed and confused I could barely function around other adults.

Now my kids are bigger with other concerns. Helping them with school, loving them and supporting them takes a huge amount of energy, even for me, and my wife does more of that than I do. Yet there are single parents who not only keep their kids fed and clothed, they manage to raise them into actual human beings.

Someone who manages to do this alone is heroic. There should be parking spaces reserved everywhere for single parents; they should have a special lane reserved for them on the freeway, and they should be exempt from income and sales taxes. Among other perks.

Are you a single parent? You are my hero, if you manage that.

Michele and I were discussing the vagaries of pinging weblogs.com this afternoon (my time).

Propagandhist: do you use MT to ping?
Propagandhist: I do it by hand. MT never works for me.

[Note that this was not a one sided conversation. Michele just had all the funny lines]

Have you pinged today?