Sidious Maul Shopping

My oldest son, Ike, and I found this great new store last night:

Sorry for the blurry image, but the dark side of the force makes it hard to focus except for when you're really angry, and, as you can plainly see, this marketplace belongs to the Sith.

The place is incredible.  The doors even open through use of the force.  I used my two fingers and beckoned the doors to open, Obi-wan style.  Ike, all Vader like, just walked through.

The Sith's Marketplace motto is "only a sith deals in absolutes, and here you get a deal on absolute-ly everything!"  It's true.  Everything is buy-one-get-one free because "always two there are."

The store's sheer potency is intoxicating (I'm not talking about the adult beverage aisle, which is literally intoxicating due more to alcohol than sheer potency).

I found myself feeling rather powerful, and I wanted to demonstrate that power by cutting off Ike's hand.  I didn't do it, but if I had, the electronics area--back behind the droids--has replacement hands.  They only come in black though, which is weird given the season.


Walking up and down the aisles I kept feeling like I should reveal things.  Things like:

1. Paternity.  "Ike, I am your father."
2. Revenge plans.  "At last we will reveal ourselves to the check-out staff, at last we will have our revenge."
3. Allies.  "Fear is my ally."
4. How operational things are.  "Now, witness the power of this fully operational jelly doughnut."
5. Paternity again.  "There is another...a sister...you'll need to share this pack of gum with her."


Ike kept commenting on the "at-long-last completeness" of things. For example :

Pointing at a hula hoop. "at long last, the circle is now complete."
Pointing at a stock boy putting together a model train display, "at long last your train...ing is nearly complete."
Walking to a corner of the store where a light was burned out, "at long last our journey to the dark side is complete."


They didn't have the milk and eggs (or the droids) we were looking for, but it was still worth the trip because we were low on red-bladed lightsabers, black capes and robes, and absolutes, so we picked some up.  We also picked up a galaxy far, far away where Ike and I, with our purchases complete, at long last will rule... and... we... shall... have... peace.

A Dozen

Wow!  Buffy and I have been married for 12 years!

Our marriage is graduating from Primary and going into the YM/YW program.  Just to cover our bases we're also having the marriage Bat-mitzvah-ed, and next year we'll have the Bar-mitzvah (for you gentiles: Bat for girls @12, Bar for boys @13).

In honor of this occasion, I would like to write a list of things that come in twelves (the number 12, not Twilight fans who are also elves):

1. doughnuts
2. deacons
3. Pacific Athletic Conference members
4. inches
5. tones
6. months
7. Apostles
8. tribes of Israel
9. things that are cheaper by the dozen
10. things that are a dime a dozen
11. things that are dirty dozens
12. the years Buffy and I have spent together
13. this list (until I added #13)


Honorable mentions:
a twelve pack
two six packs
three four packs
four three packs
six two packs
twelve one packs

Note: the way the honorable mentions are written is unclear, do I mean twelve twelve packs, twelve sets of two six packs, etc.? The answer is, yes, I mean--in every case--144 units.

Thank you and good night.

Equally and Equitably Idiotic

Several weeks ago I was feeling angry about the state of US politics, and I wrote this:

Is anyone else as fed up as I am with special interest groups from both sides of the aisle?  You know who I mean, the hypocrites, the distorters of truth, the manipulators of the public; the folks who are unable to compromise, unable to acknowledge the weak points in their own arguments, and who are so committed to ideology that the common good is irrelevant. 

This is ruining our country—bickering, infighting, tantrum, and stalemate.  

Compromise and acknowledgement of the rights of others to think differently than you do is the bedrock of progress for our country.  If you can’t agree with this idea because of your deeply held belief (right, left, religious, secular, gay, straight, scientist, creationist, black, white, Coke, or Pepsi), then you are the problem.  If we want our own rights protected, then we have to protect the rights of others on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.   

Full disclosure:  I don't really have strong political feelings that strictly align with either side of the aisle.  My belief is that an ebbing and flowing of liberal and conservative agendas will best ensure that no important areas are neglected.  Both sides bring baggage, and both sides are equally ridiculous.  Braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants, yes, correct, these are accurate descriptions.  And furthermore . . .

Conservatives:  I know you want to blame the media, but you guys often look stupid all on your own.  I'm sorry, stupid is a bad word at our house.  What I really mean to point out is that Obama is a liberal politician within the spectrum of US politics, and every time one of your factions rants and raves about his birth certificate, Muslim background, or extreme Marxist views you weaken your legitimate arguments against his policies.  The general populace cared little about Benghazi because, like when the boy cried wolf, they'd already marched up the hill a couple of times and found no threat, and to tell you the truth, the screaming kid is annoying.

Liberals: you guys like to think you look smart, but it's the kind of smart that doesn't actually know anything.  The urbane college junior that sits around expounding on stuff that he has no experience with.  The guy that everyone wants to punch in the throat just to make him stop talking--that's you.  I'm sorry, threatening to punch people in the throat is bad at our house.  I've heard a lot of liberals saying how anyone who disagrees with current liberal dogmas is on the wrong side of history.  To that I reply: we are in the present, and you don't get to decide what history will think of anything, the only thing that is certain is that history will think that your wardrobe is old fashioned.

Religious: how about trying to live the way your religion teaches?  Hypocrisy is potentially found most in those who have a high standard to live up to.  Also, Christians, "with what judgment ye judge, shall ye be judged."  If that's true and you set your own rubric for how you'll be judged, you may want to consider--oh, I don't know--praying for your enemy, doing good to those who hate you, and being as merciful as can be to those who despitefully use you.

Secularists:  Simmer down.  People have the right (a constitutional right in the United States) to practice religion.  Stop trampling on that because you thought church was boring when you were a kid, or because you think believing in God is naive.  To believers, not believing in God is equally naive, and plenty of smart, educated, knowledgeable people have been (and are) believers.  Nothing in science or the natural world definitively dis-proves that there is a God anymore than proves that there is a God.  Maybe people who choose to live by faith understand something that you are not able to understand. Full Disclosure: church is boring, so what?

Gays: The word you are looking for is equity, not equality.  Equal rights mean same rights, which you have: any single man can marry any single woman.  You want fairness, or equity.  I'm with you on that.  You should have access to fair, equitable treatment in your relationships.  But, seriously, you've got to lay off people that disagree with redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.  There actually is empirical evidence that shows a destabilization of marriage rates and traditional family units in general when laws are enacted that focus on married couples rather than potential familial units (e.g., common law marriage, same-sex marriage, etc.).  Here is my source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9908951/Gay-marriage-will-destabilise-family-life-sociologist-warns.html.  I believe that equitable civil unions and not marriages would have been better for society in general.  Sorry if that makes you mad.

Straights: I'm talking to straight people who want to block gay marriage: you didn't find a rational argument to make, and now it's too late.  You've lost this one.  Get over it.

Scientists: I mean you folks that use science as proof of your atheist religion.  The more we learn about the laws governing the universe/multiverse the more it looks like there is a possibility that a highly evolved being could create a universe in His/Her/Its kitchen, and if it's possible, then, in a infinite universe with finite elements--it has happened.  Ladies and gentlemen, science believes in God(s)!

Creationists:  Faith is evidence of things not seen.  Science is based on observation.  It's not the same thing.

Black/white: I have nothing to add here.

Coke/Pepsi: Nobody cares about your cola preference.  Drink some water.

A Moving Experience

We changed houses last week for some reason.

This "moving" as it is called by English speakers is a fool's errand, a goon's deed*, a rube's project if you will--and why wouldn't you (I have more, see below for the complete list).  

To move, here is what you do: take all of the stuff that you have accumulated over the past 37.9 years, pick it up, carry it to some sort of vehicle, set it down, drive for a while, pick it up again, and set it down again.  You follow this process with everything you have, including push pins, and shower curtains, and cans of beans, and sand paper, and wrist watches, and chutes and ladders, and chutes, and ladders, and holiday wreaths, and blenders, and night gowns, and formal gowns, and semi-formal gowns, and business-casual gowns, and casual gowns, and artwork, and toasters, and ... well, you get the point. 

While pursuing my first graduate degree, I did an internship at the Governor's office.  We had to move the governor's staff out of the capitol while the capitol building was renovated.  They brought prisoners from the point of the mountain to do the moving, which, after last week, I think might be a better crime deterrent than the death penalty--there were a couple of moments last week where I longed for the sweet release of death.  Then I realized that moving is the very labor that we who go to Hell will be engaged in--Eternal Packing, as it is called in the scriptures.

The night just before moving day, Buffy and I didn't go to bed.  We just wandered around the house picking up and putting down stuff, usually into boxes.  Buffy went thirty-six hours without sleeping.  By the end of moving day she was staggering like a drunken sailor--a beautiful, sophisticated, golden-voiced drunken sailor.  I actually got a couple of 15-minute naps during the night.  One while sitting on the toilet, and one while taking apart Mimi's bed.  Sleeping on the toilet is never a good sign for how your life is going, and I'm pretty sure that sleeping on a pile of bed parts while clutching an allen wrench is a very bad omen.  Quoth the raven, "nevermore." 

The reason for the sleepless night is because we wanted to be ready for when people showed up the next morning to help us load the truck.  Humankind hate showing up to help someone move only to learn that nothing is packed and ready.  We are afraid of people hating us, so we wanted to be organized and ready.  But, being organized takes forever, and at some point you just have to get it done.  In that way, Buffy and I complement each other very well.  She spent several days (weeks, even) organizing and packing things, then when it was time to just get it done, I swooped in, threw it all in a box, scrawled something unreadable on the box and cleared it the hell out of there. 

So, about 60 percent of our stuff is perfectly organized with labels that say things like, "downstairs living room: board games, children's books, anvils." These boxes practically unpack themselves.  The other 40 percent is in boxes labeled "Swwwfng Room" and "udnstars bdreew."  So, you know, not bad.

The moral of this story is that moving is not enjoyable and that we should all repent so that we are not eventually sentenced to an eternity laboring with the "moving squadrons of the netherworld." 

The End

The rest of the list:

a chucklehead's task,

a yahoo's duty,

a bumpkin's chore,

a moron's pledge,

a simpleton's career, 

a dunderhead's occupation,

jive turkey work,

a doo doo pie's trade,

a dimwit's vocation,

a nincompoop's business,

a bonehead's job, or
a doody pants' line of work.

*a phrase used in the third-to-last episode of 30 Rock.

Blasphemy!

My three-year-old son, Cubby, has become a bit of a handful at church.  Yes, he's the one from this story.

His behavior is mostly my  fault, I'll admit.  In January he left his beloved nursery to start his time as a Sunbeam in Jr. Primary.  I have been (until last week) the primary chorister.  He took the fact that I stand in front of the room and wave my arm to mean that he owned the place, and he would roam around the primary room, draw on the chalkboard, and generally cause mayhem while his teacher tried in vain to rein him in.

Buffy couldn't help because she was not in church for the first month-and-a-half that Cubby was in primary because of Toby's birth the first week of January.  And, like I said, I had to be in front waving my arm.  So, no parents were available to apply the needed amounts of fear and threat to contain the boy.  In other words, Cubby is a free-range sunbeam.  And, this may be the main reason I have been released, well, along with this.

So last week, Easter Sunday, Cubby and I sat in sacrament meeting when he began to squirm restlessly.

I whispered, "Stop, or I will take you home and put you on time out."

"Okay, let's go home," he replied.  He knew, even at age three, that church is often more boring than a time out.  My bluff had been called, and I was caught.

"I was just kidding," I backpedaled, "we need to stay here."

"Why?" he asked contorting his body the way children do when they are overly bored and constricted.

"Because we love Jesus and we want to learn about Him."  I reasoned in whispered tones while wrestling him back on to my lap and into sitting position.

Cubby was not buying it.  "I HATE JESUS!" he screamed.  This is, of course, not what one should yell in church on Easter Sunday.   Screaming in church is generally frowned upon, but if one must yell, one should yell hallelujah or hosanna or amen or gesundheit--it's really hard to make a case for yelling I hate Jesus in a Christian church. 

The universe froze as I, the father of the blasphemer, contemplated what to do.  It didn't take long to decide on a course of action.  I stood, scooped him up, and headed for the exit.

Cubby, sensing that he had found his ticket out of there poured gas on the flame, "I HATE JESUS!  I HATE JESUS!"

All I could think of was, get him out of here before the Christians stone him!  I pulled the boy into my body trying to muffle his blasphemous cries with the child-drool-stained shoulder of my suit coat and speed walked out the door of the chapel.

I didn't stop until we were safely half-way down the hallway.  Then I held him up to look him in the eye, to talk to him about what he'd said.  He looked back at me with his beautiful brown eyes while his adorable mouth delivered a great big grin.

"Cubby," I said, "we can't say that about Jesus.  We love Him."  He just smiled back at me.  His eyes shone bright and he appeared,  to me, to be completely innocent.

He's three.  He is innocent.  I relented.  Wasn't that part of Jesus' atonement?  Jesus has covered the sins and misdeeds of children.  Three-year-olds are not guilty of blasphemy (it's their parents who shoulder the blame at that age...).

Later that evening while serving a time out for an unrelated issue, we heard Cubby knocking on his bedroom door from the inside.  He called out,  "I like Heavenly Father, now.  Can I come out?"

Toby

Oh, by the way, we have a new child. We call him Toby (names have been changed--his name is actually Kunta Kinte). He's two-and-a-half months old now. He's got a monkey nose, a monkey face, and a monkey bum. Actually his body parts are human. I guess what I mean is that he is cute, cute like unto a monkey.

Measurements: 10 lb. 1 oz., 23 inches!, which means--for those of you unschooled in the sizes of human offspring--he was size fifty huge!

Ike, Mimi, Kitty, and Cubby agree with me and Lady Buffington that he is a great addition to the family.  We will continue to feel so until such time that he becomes overly bothersome or burdensome at which time we will excuse him from being in our family, and he will find familial relations elsewhere.  We do not anticipate this happening because we are far too accommodating of new family members during their years on probation, and up to this point have become stuck with them as we have let them all come off probation rather than terminate them.  After probation, the process of terminating family relationships is difficult, so we just put  up with whatever shenanigans we are forced up with to put.

PS Toby smells so good!  He's an angel from heaven with hilariously suspicious eyes.

Pitch

IDEA FOR A SITUATION COMEDY:

Peter Wilson is a professional roof raiser. His roof-raising boss is a high fiver. Peter does such an amazing job raising roofs that one day his boss high fives him so hard that it breaks his shoulder and he has to go on disability. Soon we learn that his career as a roof raiser is over. To make ends meet, Peter finds a job lowering floors.

Meanwhile, his boss feels so bad that he moves in with Peter to be his part-time, after-hours, unpaid house keeper. Peter continues to refer to his former boss and current housekeeper as Boss because he doesn't know his real name.  Peter claims it's out of respect, but Boss suspects there is something else behind it, a speech impediment issue with the letters R, W, and J.

In episode three, Peter's mom comes to visit--played by an actress that the audience is vaguely familiar with (because she played the mom/grandma in several other sitcoms)--and she decides to move in with Peter. She says it's because she wants to help Peter through his injury, but really she is romantically interested in Boss (a courtship arc begins that is later abandoned when Mom gets a better job as a mom on a one-hour drama).

Meanwhile, the floor-lowering business really takes off and Peter becomes a sought after floor lowerer. In the final episode of the first season, Peter receives a check for $114 Million for a floor lowering project he completed in Mumbai. Peter is surprised because he thought the job was for $114.00. At the same time the roof raising industry collapses, literally (i.e., all of the raised roofs since Peter's departure from the company fall down), and Boss is fired.

In the final scene of the season, Peter hires Boss to be his permanent, paid butler. They make plans to move to India where floor lowering is very lucrative. A second season set in India is promised.

The show is cancelled while on hiatus. No India-set episodes are taped.