DADWAGON

Up quite early this morning to vote. Took J.P. along with me, which, as with many things with a 3-year-old, wasn’t easy. First, had to convince him we were voting and not boating, an activity he is afraid of. Then a lengthy argument about wearing his coat. Then about his hat. Then about bringing his trains with him. Shockingly, I won all of these arguments.

Slightly off topic: boat snobbery rhymes with boobery, sort of.

Now, if kids could vote (which is actually a clothing site), J.P. could have laid one down for the Socialist candidate, Dan Fein (couldn’t vote Bloomberg—he likes Cheez-its and I’m a Cheetos man from way back; couldn’t vote Thompson—he’s a hack; almost voted Green—but I hate the environment, which is also a clothing site.)

As it was, I let him pull the lever. So at least I saved a little energy.

Improving democracy is really all about me.

Perhaps if Cookie Magazine had run more articles like “Vice Is Nice” in its august pages, it wouldn’t have gone out of business. Or perhaps it was this good/terrible all along, and I just never knew it because of the ridiculous name, the elevation of consumerism-as-religion, or the vanity photo spreads about super-vegan celebrity parents?

From the article, a taste of what could have saved American publishing:

On what to bring to playdates:

One neighbor specialized in gimlets, another in craft beers, and yet another in cult bargain wines. It didn’t take long for this impromptu family rave to fragment into further vice tribes. Just as kids of a certain age gravitated toward the playhouse and others played kickball, for the adults there was the secret smoker’s club, a group of people who perched on the perimeter, furtively sharing a single cigarette, ready to stamp it out if a kid approached. And then there was the secret pot club, a group of recreational stoners who had more vigilant security procedures. They would collectively disappear entirely, smoke in shifts, and return to the party. I once observed a mother/lookout stopping curious kids from finding the pot smoker’s circle in a side yard by intercepting the kids with a platter of cheese and crackers. Paranoia makes perfect.

On justifying it:

all parents agree that a little too much pot is better than a little too much booze. Legal or not, “There’s nothing worse for parenting than a hangover,” says Marny. “And it’s not like we’re getting messed up and driving our kids around, which our parents very well might’ve been,” says another. “We feed them organic food. We’re using car seats. We don’t drive drunk, and we’re not about to drive high.” While parenting may make you feel emotionally grounded, you’re grounded the other way too, meaning you’re not going anywhere if you haven’t lined up a babysitter. So you might as well make good use of the liquor cabinet or the stash, as the case may be. (All the better when the neighbors are of like mind.)

On the Ludditic parentage of non-stoner parents of the contrary opinion:

While some parents joke, others aren’t amused. “If they want to get high around their kids, that’s their decision,” says one wary mother we’ll call Michele, who still occasionally indulges in a toke now and again. “But I certainly don’t want them stoned and babysitting my kids. God forbid a kid gets hurt and the mom is too high to deal with it responsibly.”

I am a believer in the power of facts. I was raised by a scientist; I used to be one of those kids who read encylopedias for fun. (Stop snickering.) When confronted with some voguish piece of populist lore, my basic instinct is to hold it at arm’s length, poke at it with a ruler (graduated in hundredths of an inch), and see if I can deflate it.  (I’ve taught myself not to do this when people promote their pet theories at cocktail parties, because it doesn’t get me invited back.)

Which brings me to the subject of vaccines. Like every thinking (or at least Website-reading) parent right now, I have been exposed to a lot of pro- and anti-vaccine opinion, and even the fact of that infuriates me. This is a subject requiring real information, and (as this excellent story in Wired, by Amy Wallace, says), “Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void.” The chief stepper there is Jenny McCarthy, a woman who thinks smallpox vaccines are dangerous but a pound or so of Dow Corning silicone gel, parked in the intramammary fold of an 18-year-old, is perfectly acceptable. Some toxins—that’s the nonspecific word these people use, “toxins,” because it means anything they don’t like—are more acceptable than others.

The most fundamental way reason vaccines work is that we all agree to use them, because of what’s called “herd immunity,” and that’s especially important because not every vaccine takes. Occasionally, a dose doesn’t do its job. If my kid is one of those whose vaccine didn’t take, the fact that you allowed your kid to be a carrier puts him at risk.

Let the number of non-vaccinated members of the population creep up a little more, and herd immunity evaporates. If 20 percent of us refuse vaccines, the wildfire nature of infectious disease returns, and we are practically back in the Middle Ages. Which is, of course, the basic problem: Short memories. Until two generations ago, everyone knew a family who’d lost a couple of kids, or seen them badly damaged, by basic childhood diseases. Mumps, scarlet fever, diphtheria. Blindness, deafness, disfigurement.

This week my little guy got his flu shot. (He was a trouper.) And yet, even from my rock-solid belief system … that awful stuff creeps into my head. Mercury. Autism. Big Pharma’s perfidies. The  study, ten years down the road, that finds a benign ingredient to be anything but. This is how they work, the zealots, by planting that fearful voice in the back of your head.  And they’re able to make some connection it to the real reason you’d skip the needle, the one that doesn’t have any science attached at all, just a basic humanity: It’s a little bit of a relief to skip anything that involves a sharp piece of steel in your sweet baby’s flesh. I cringed the first time I saw it; I cringed again when it went in. And if I’d been a little more ignorant, I might’ve listened to Jenny and her crowd for just a bit longer. That may be the fearmongers’ best weapon.

First, I’d like to introduce an amazing word I came across in my travels through the internets recently: superfetation. Don’t know it? Well, superfetation happens to be “the formation of a fetus from a different menstrual cycle while another embryo is already present in the uterus,” according to the knowledge fellows over at wikipedia.

That a single word covers this phenomenon pleases me greatly.

I happened to notice this word on the very same day that my step-brother sent me an email letting me know that he was having a child. It was quite early in his wife’s pregnancy, so early, in fact, that he didn’t know the sex of the child. He had, however, already come up with gender-dependent names, which he shared with me (Aiden for boy, Kaitlyn for girl).

Call me superstitious, but prior to my son Jerod’s birth, there would have been no chance of my sharing his name with anyone (except his mother, my ex-wife, and then only because it felt fair to let her know what I was going to call her son). Giving up the name so early strikes me as a form of tempting the hand-of-God type activity, which—I know it’s a stretch—reminded me of superfetation.

How? Well, consider the dramatic upswing in multiple births in this country, which in and of itself smacks of religious retribution for late-age pregnancy and the use of fertility drugs instead of vigorous schtupping; then factor in the idea of determining the name of a child before the child even has a sex; add to that the possibility that more children can be created during the pregnancy (superfetation), in a sort-of-miracle (assuming you want many kids all at once) reminiscent of the Immaculate Conception only with fucking—and well, then, it seems to me the better part of valor not to mention the name of the child.

And yes, I mean that sharing the child’s name is the very sort of thing that a God, if he/she/they/whatever existed, potentially might not like and would furthermore consider a high-order provocation resulting in biblical-type smiting.

Keep it to yourself, I say!

Last word (from me) on names: check out namevoyager.com to chart the popularity of your child’s name. Jerod occurs once out of every 50 million births in the United States, and is, in the opinion of this particular website, associated with the color blue.