Being a father is seriously weird. It seems as though my wife was born knowing how to do all this stuff- as if motherhood is hardwired in the female DNA. I, on the other hand, am flailing helplessly through a sea of diapers and bottles and teeny tiney itty bitty little clothes.
First off, the hospital. After 30 hours and two epidurals, we have a screaming, slimey, blueish purpleish screaming thing, with toes that resemble nothing more than corn niblets, microscopic brownish-red nails, way more hair than I expected, and enormous dark eyes.
He looked at me. Right there in the delivery room. Everyone told me he wouldn't open his eyes for a few days, that he won't be able to see much more than light and dark for the first few months, but dagnabbit that boy looked me right square in the eye and held my gaze, like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he star'd at the Pacific and feverishly calculated the cost of all that beachfront property.
He looked at me as if to say, well, here I am. What are you gonna do now, tough guy?
First off, I blubbered like a beauty pageant winner. And then I got to work.
Here is this tiny person, I mean an actual functional tiny human being, completely helpless and totally dependent on you for all his bodily needs. That right there is an enormous amount of pressure. That's why I got this new job at Big & Huge Electronics. Good pay, good benefits, good promotion prospects.
I'm hoping I don't screw it up.
What would happen if I lost my job? What would happen if I got hit by a bus? What would happen if there was a sudden zombie apocalypse and we had to make a run to the Arctic Circle, shooting thousands of zombies while roaring through Canada in our armored Winnebago packed to the roof with canned food and diapers and ammo and Adam Sandler DVDs and perhaps a fellow survivor or two. Hell, I don't even have life insurance or a machine gun.
These are the things I worry about on the 2 hour commute home from work. I sit there in the dark, crammed on a bus with my fellow proles snoring around me as we barrel down the Garden State Parkway at a speed just a little over the limit, leaning side to side as we zip in and out of traffic. I sit in the dark and I worry about economic downturns, and biological warfare, and terrorist attacks, and why the bus driver feels it necessary to smoke all that crack right before we leave the Port Authority bus terminal.
I worry about being a bad father. I worry about the screaming, irrational, abusive maniac I know is buried somewhere deep inside of me, and whether it will ever come out. I worry about not being able to provide for my son.
I worry about being a bad role model.
But then I come home, and I pick my son up, and he smiles at me. Honest injun. I know, it's just gas, but it isn't, because he only does it when I smile at him.
And everything is alright.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Alone in the dark with my thoughts.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Update
Wow, I haven't posted in, like, two months. And that was only a quicky post to let you guys know about the release of Chainik ver. 2.0
Where to begin?
First of all, I got me a new job at a place I'll refer to simply as Big & Huge Electronics. It's a good job with great pay and awesome benefits and terrific colleagues and if I didn't have to commute 2 hours each way for my ten-hour-long shift life would be totally awesome.
Mrs Chainik and I are slowly getting used to Chainik 2.0. He's loud. Very loud. He has a way of making his displeasure at the world known quit efficiently despite his total lack of a vocabulary, much like Wall Street analyst Jim Cramer. Luckily for the kid, he's been able to stave off a bout of drunken, unfit-parent-initiated neglect by being so cute I could just kill myself. He looks mostly like his mother, except for the enormous Chainik nose, which has been laboriously passed down from father to son from time immemorial, like our hair-trigger tempers and tendency for diabetes. He smiles, though. Yes, everyone has told us that it's just gas, but he smiles in response to stimuli, such as his father smiling at him, tickling him under his chin, and saying things like "you cost more that a used Honda in decent condition, you screaming, eating poop machine!" in a big, smiley, Sesame Street voice. He even laughed at us, twice.
I'll try to update more often, okay?
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Sunday, July 01, 2007
IPhone Nerds!
I was in the mall with Mrs Chainik Friday, just chillaxin. We bought some maternity stuff, and I am just going to have to take my wife's word for it that simply buying normal stuff in larger sizes will not be sufficient.
While we were there, we passed by a group of hippies sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Gymboree. This confused me, as I hadn't heard that Phish was reuniting and playing the Freehold Raceway Mall (which has its own Wiki page? of course it does, what doesn't?). More hippies and nerds of various descriptions lined the walls of the mall. The mystery was solved when I got to the Apple store and remembered about the iPhone (looks like Apple has an employee in charge of editing wiki pages).
I went into the Apple Store to look around. I've never been to an Apple store before but I figured it couldn't be very different than any other of the countless computer stores I've ever been in. Boy was I wrong.
Have you ever seen an iPod? It was like that but in retail form. Everything was clean and white and perfectly proportioned and beautifully lit. The bright lights illuminated squeaky clean, helpful, knowledgable, interestingly multiculti staff. I looked at some of the computers there. Did you know that Apple laptops only have one mouse button? How the hell does that work? And the computers look pretty, like desk lamps designed by Frank Gehry. What in the hell? Computers need to look big and clunky and kludgy and functional, like they came out of the boiler room of a Russian submarine. This place looked like Dell had been bought by Ikea.
What a good metaphor. I need to write that down somewhere.
My cellphone is the Motorola Q. It's PC based, with Windows CE (which means it crashes about three times a week, badum-pshh!). It's very awesomely cool, and I get compliments on it wherever I go.
Okay, that last part was a filthy rotten lie. But I still like having a cellphone with an enormous screen and a full sized keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera and rotten battery life and the ability to hack into the registry and change stuff.
Mrs Chainik couldn't understand why people would stand in line for a $500 cellphone.
The lonely, misunderstood life of a nerd, I suppose. If only they had girlfriends.
On a related note, some lady in Texas decided to buy a whole big bunch of iPhones so she could sell them on eBay. She got $10,000 in cash and drove to an Apple store, where she paid the nerd who was first in line $800 cash to take his place.
The punchline?
Apple, unlike Sony, placed a 1-per-customer limit on purchases the first day to ensure everyone got one. Mwahahahaha, lady got iPowned. Watch the video here:
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Wedding Legal Fun! I mean, Legal Wedding Fun! Fun Wedding Legal!
DISCLAIMER: IANAL
How do you become qualified to be an officiant at a wedding? Legally speaking, I mean.
My Google-fu is strong. I found this list of qualifications to be allowed to officiate at weddings, organized by state. Fascinating reading, if you have the time. The common denominator is, you have to be part of the gubmint (either a judge, county clerk, clerk of the court, mayor, councilperson, what have you) OR you have to be some species of religious poobah muckety muck. Most states are quite liberal in their definition of "sky pilot".
Alaska allows a "commissioned officer of the Salvation Army" to preform a wedding. Connecticut specifically states that "marriages witnessed by a duly constituted Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is are valid". Florida lets notary publics marry people. Guam keeps things simple by saying, simply "All ordained clergymen and priests of whatsoever religious faith who are recognized as such by the religious body whose faith they represent".
Hawaii lets members of Congress conduct weddings. Indiana, wanting to outdo Connecticut, recognizes "(6) The Friends Church, in accordance with the rules of the Friends Church. (7) The German Baptists, in accordance with the rules of their society. (8) The Bahai faith, in accordance with the rules of the Bahai faith. (9) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in accordance with the rules of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (10) An imam of a masjid (mosque), in accordance with the rules of the religion of Islam". A resident of Maine can be married in Maine by a lawyer and member of the Maine bar. Nevada allows even those authorized to preform marriages in other states to marry people in Las Vegas if they fill out a form.
New York allows leaders of The New York Society for Ethical Culture to preform weddings, and also I presume to drone on and on about secular humanism and to be as boring as real ministers of actual religions. in Ohio the "superintendent of the state school for the deaf" may preform weddings. In Oklahoma an "ecclesiastical dignitary" must be at least 18 to preform marriages, and Oklahoma is also the only state to refer to "him or her" instead of just "him". Pennsylvania requires that "marriage does require words uttered to establish at that precise time the relationship of husband and wife". South Carolina is the strictest, saying that "Only ministers of the Gospel or accepted Jewish rabbis and officers authorized to administer oaths in this State are authorized to administer a marriage ceremony". In fact, the only state in the union that will let any damn fool preform a wedding ceremony is Vermont, which doesn't appear to have any qualifications at all.
Yet there is no qualifications to actually get married. Maybe some kind of test or classes or counseling would be appropriate and help curtail divorce.
My baby bro got married last night, and my mind wandered during the chuppah. The lesson: when attending a sibling's wedding, charge your camera batteries beforehand. Otherwise, your camera will die and you will get bored and your mind will wander as you try not to die of heat exhaustion. Bonus: my bro's father in law's rebbi came, and at the chassan's tisch we learned that this esteemed individual is actually our third cousin (Jewish Geography ftw). When calling him up for a brocha under the chuppah, he was referred to as the "great uncle of the chassan". Hah.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A deep moral and philosophical question of great import.
If I told you I found Waiting for Godot amusing and interesting, would you think less of me?
I saw it on PBS a few years back, and I actually liked it. I found it interesting and full of fascinating imagery. Plus its full of my favorite form of humor, the non sequitur. But I grew up in Boro Park and learned long ago not to show any signs of intellectualism. Also I'm pretty sure that admitting to like Beckett is a sign of snobbishness.
Anyhoo, here is Waiting for Woody Alan. The beards are badly pasted on, and the accents silly, but the dialogue is dead on- you could hear it on Thirteenth Avenue in any conversation.
That's probably why I liked Waiting for Godot so much- besides for the Oirish brogues, boyo, the dialogue was straight out of Shomrei Shabbos after 11:00.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Announcing Chainik 2.0
The Chainik Hocker Corporation (Chainik and Mrs. Chainik) wish to announce the beta release of Chainik 2.0, with a projected global release date of November 2007.
I am terrified and exhilarated.
Friday morning, Mrs Chainik and I visited our local OBGYN. Using a device that looked like a Playskool Sing With Me Karaoke machine, we listened to the baby's heartbeat for the first time.
First we heard a slow, steady whoosh... whoosh.... whoosh sound. "That's you, Mom" said the Doctor, who looked and sounded way too much like Sarah Silverman for my comfort. It took quite a while for her to find the baby's heartbeat, which concerned the Mrs and myself. "Takes a while to find the baby" said Dr. Silverman (not her name but that's what I'm going to call her and if she doesn't like it she can start her own blog). "The baby keeps moving." Just like its father, I told Mrs Chainik later.
Then we heard it. WishWishWishWishWishWishWish!
I choked up, I really did. I found it a little hard to catch my breath. That's my baby! I looked at Mrs Chainik and she squeezed my hand, and I tried to say something but no words came out of my mouth. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that I am not often speechless.
It was a combination of awe and fear. It really hit me. We've known for two months that Mrs Chainik is expecting, and we got a sonogram picture last month, but it was never really real until that second.
Wow. Wow.
Wow.
Even now, I don't quite know what to say.
Wow!
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Stopping the next pandemic before it starts.
Mrs Chainik has been studying to be a medical assistant. As a training tool for the "don't do anything stupid or you'll get a horrible disease and die" module, they watched the Dustin Hoffman- Morgan Freeman- Ross's monkey medical thriller Outbreak. That night we went to Walgrens and bought a big bottle of hand sanitizer and a little keychain full of hand sanitizer and some Lysol.
Mrs. Chainik is funny.
H/T Instapundit.
 clipped from www.wired.comHIV, Ebola, SARS — any of the world's most horrifying diseases are caused by animal viruses that made the jump to humans. Now a UCLA scientist thinks he can stop the next pandemic before it even starts.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Which way do I go, which way do I go?
If not for my Garmin, I'd be lost a lot more often than I am. Unfortunately, here in Lakewood NJ, they are building faster than the map people can draw. I hate going to a customer and the thing says "Driving off map!!!" in a panic, like my GPS unit is actually sentient and doesn't want to die because it's stuck to the windshield of some moron who's just driven into the woods.
I know for a fact that my GPS is self aware by the smug and condescending tone of voice it uses when it tells me how big a moron I am for making a wrong turn anyway despite its best efforts. It sounds like Alfred when Bruce Wayne comes back to the Batcave with his Batsuit in tatters and the Batmobile is smoking and the Batsciatica is acting up again.
Maybe we could give all GPS units little arms so they can steer the car themselves and little legs so they can jump out of cars being driven into the woods by an achy Batman. I don't know how it would work with the Three Laws but the Garmins sure would appreciate it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make a left turn onto UNKNOWN
