Introduction
Every year I write a Holiday Newsletter and send it with my holiday cards. As
newsletters go, mine isn’t very useful; it doesn’t, for example, describe the
highlights of the year. In fact, I
usually focus on a single low point of my year, just to counter-balance all the
highlights you’ll read about in other people’s newsletters. Or it’s simply random—the “secret Santa” of
holiday newsletters, you might say.
In 2005, I had a hard time thinking clearly enough to write
anything. My kids were four and two and
I wasn’t always getting much sleep. So I
decided to embrace randomness as not only the style but the substance of my
Holiday Newsletter. Since this year’s newsletter
was inappropriate for a wide audience, I’m posting the 2005 edition from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.
Holiday Newsletter - December
17, 2005
I’d hoped to elegantly summarize this past year into a
coherent, flowing essay. But I just don’t
think I’m going to get there. In fact, I
think I’ll always remember 2005 as the year I gave up on structure
altogether. I guess this was inevitable,
given the whirlwind of family life, especially the inexplicable behavior of
children and their sudden tantrums.
For example, Alexa broke down crying during an argument
about whether “Mulamimoto” (the name of her imaginary cat) begins with an “M”
or an “R.” She’d asked me how it
was spelled and then refused to accept my answer.
Pre-verbal Lindsay, meanwhile, will fixate on some food
item, cry because it’s not presented quickly enough, stop crying when she gets
it, and then start bawling all over again. Why?
Too hot? Too cold? Too much?
Not enough? When this kind of
scenario occupies most of your waking moments, it gets to be too much. So I finally gave in and accepted that my
life had become jumbled and disordered and
there was nothing to be done about it.
Once I acknowledged the chaos of my life and stopped trying
to maintain order, I began to find unpredictability addictive. I started listening to MP3 music on “shuffle”
mode, which has caused some shocking segues.
I’ve decided to bring that randomness to my newsletter and write down
whatever ideas come to mind, in no particular order.
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A magazine called “Real Simple” appeared in my
bathroom. It’s an easy read. It really is simple. There’s a recipe in there called “cupcakes
with ice cream frosting” that has only two ingredients. One is “cupcakes.” I’m not kidding! Anyway, there’s a column in “Real Simple”
where readers write in with their time-saving tips. I’m going to send them this one: stop worrying about cleaning out the
car. The next time you forget the diaper
bag, you’ll be glad you can get by with what’s strewn on the floor. We keep a bag of clothes in the back that we
intend to donate to the Salvation Army.
When we’re really behind on laundry, it’s nice to be able to dip back
into that bag to dress the kids.
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Here’s a nice segue: “Puff
the Magic Dragon” right into Beastie Boys’ “Time to Get Ill.” (Speaking of music, I got stuck in a mall
recently and have decided that “Winter Wonderland” should be classified as a
munition. It must have been developed to
demoralize the enemy.)
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I had a rough night recently. At around two in the morning, my wife Erin
shook me awake. There was an incredible
racket: it sounded electronic, and yet
human. A ringing/screaming kind of
sound. Erin handed me a white plastic
object and said, “Make it talk.” Or
maybe she said, “Make it stop.” Or maybe
something else entirely. I took the
object in my hand and stared at it. It
was making at least part of the noise.
Then it hit me: this thing is a
phone! This realization introduced a new
problem: how to make it talk, or make it
stop. Then I remembered: the talk button. I found it and pressed it. Some of the noise subsided. Now I realized there had been two
noises: a ringing phone, and a crying
baby. But what was Lindsay doing in our
bed? (Only later did I learn that she’d
had a nightmare about a “scary monkey” and demanded to sleep with Erin and me.) Now I was more confused than ever. I stared at the phone. Why had it rung? It dawned on me that somebody must have
called, and whoever that was must be on the line and waiting for me to speak. I put the phone to my ear and said: “Hello.”
There was a long pause, and then the person on the phone
spoke, very quietly, a babbled, murky word, as though spoken across a great
distance, and muffled by cotton, or a mouthful of mashed potatoes: “Brandon.”
I have a colleague named Brandon, but this didn’t sound like
him. It sounded like somebody on his
deathbed speaking his last word. I
considered this for a moment before saying, “Brandon?”
Again, the voice gurgled:
“Brandon.”
Totally confused, I decided to go with what I knew to be
true. “This isn’t Brandon,” I said. “This is Dana.”
A long pause. Over
the screech of Lindsay’s crying, I was finally able to make out that the caller
was someone from work trying to solve a problem and looking for Brandon. He had to settle for me.
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Another time-saving tip for “Real Simple”: forget the Diaper Genie. Instead, when you change your baby, just drop
the soiled diaper anywhere. Then, whenever you think to
do it, kick a few diapers toward the bathroom trash can. At some point, gather them from the bathroom
floor and throw them out all at once.
This way, you won’t have to wash your hands as often.
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I guess I shouldn’t admit this, but I haven’t seen Lindsay’s
glasses in weeks. I’m not sure anybody
else has even realized they’re missing. I
fear we’re not running a very tight ship here.
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Another nice segue:
from Chopin’s Nocturne for Piano in G minor, Op. 15/3, right into “Fell
On Black Days” by Soundgarden.
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I think there was a distinct moment when I gave up on
structure and accepted senselessness. It
was when buying hair gel. I hadn’t been
getting to the barber as often as I should, so I’d been experimenting with
increasingly robust hair gels. I started
with Suave “Mega Hold,” which is rated as an “8” on the hold scale. (The units aren’t specified.) On my next trip to the store Mega Hold was
gone, but in its place was “Maximum Hold,” at 10. This all made sense until my next trip, when
I discovered “Extreme Hold” at 12. Given
how arbitrary the units were, couldn’t they have made 10 have the top rating? And since when can you get more hold (or more
anything) than Maximum? Isn’t “Extreme”
less than “Maximum”? The precise
calibration of hair gel hold had turned out to be total illusion.
I almost called Suave for clarification until I remembered
my argument with Palmolive customer service.
A sticker on their “new” product had said, “Kills twice the bacteria.” I called customer service and expressed shock
that my old Palmolive was leaving bacteria on my dishes, but they assured me it
did not—that both the old and new
products killed all the bacteria.
How could this be? If the old
Palmolive killed all the bacteria, how could the new Palmolive kill twice as
much? We went around and around until
the service representative said, “Sir, it’s just a slogan. It doesn’t mean anything.”
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Despite being frazzled a lot of the time, I think my
attitude has actually been pretty good.
Still, I sometimes worry. Tonight
Alexa asked me to play a game with her. (She
doesn’t do board games yet; just made-up role-playing games.) I assumed she meant our standard game, in
which I surgically remove her appendix.
But tonight she announced she wanted to play a new game: Deathbed.
I told her I didn’t know that game, and she told me we could make it up
together. It went fine. At the end I told her she had to speak her
last words. Her choice: “Done.”
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On that note, I guess I should go. Happy holidays!
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