DADWAGON

Over at Time.com, our beloved Nathan heads to SXSW to figure out how we can turn this here little logorrheic dadblog into a revenue-generating entity:

After 18 months of doing it simply for the pure squee of self-expression — racking up a million pageviews in the process — we are ready to think about racking up some money.

Along the way, he meets various Internet gurus who tell him that to earn the big bucks, he—and I guess this means Theodore and me as well—is going to have to do some real work:

You’re not going to make money until you learn how to get in touch with your readers as well. And that would require us to stop being wallflowers and dive into the broader community of fathers, perhaps with a product we’re selling: something that would require real outreach and effort.

What does this all mean for DadWagon? Will we become the corporate shills you know we’ve always wanted to be? Or will we reject the siren song of advertising kopeks? To find out, please send us $7.99 via PayPal. The answer will be revealed forthwith.

That headline sure sounds scientific, doesn’t it? I have no idea what it means, but it feels like the right way to describe yesterday’s Getting Home From Preschool adventure. Man, it seemed like it was going to go well: I arrived to a loud cry of “Daddy!” from Sasha, who rushed up to hug me and then, more important, gave me no trouble when I put on her coat, scarf, hat, and mittens. She looked her teacher in the eye as she said good-bye, and then we went outside.

That’s when things just suddenly changed—so instantaneously that it was as if we’d stepped through a wormhole into another universe, a universe of crabby, crying, uncooperative toddlers. Now Sasha was walking in the wrong direction, and calling for her best friend, Katerina, who hadn’t yet left school, and then I saw the M22 bus coming and grabbed her to get onboard, and then she was absolutely in tears, writhing and screaming for Mommy.

This was—if I may be allowed a terribly off-color, insensitive, and unnecessary joke—a Fukushima-level meltdown. By the time we’d made it onto the F train, she’d calmed down, but only slightly, and though it seemed to have disappeared when we got home, it was apparently only hiding in the background. When it was time for her to brush her teeth and put on an overnight diaper and go to bed, she went Chernobyl. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry at her: With Sasha standing in the middle of her bedroom, I turned off the light and closed the door, and I stood there while she pounded on it and screamed and cried. Fuck, what do you do? Through the door, Jean and I told her she was in Time Out, but that did nothing.

Instead, we stood there feeling guilty for 5 minutes, then went in, told her we loved her, and put her to bed properly. And then she was once again a sweet little girl, apologetic and loving and wonderful. The quantum switch had been flipped back.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Woe unto the man (or woman) who attempts to woo my daughter!

Bonus quantum physics reference: Often, mornings remind me of Schrödinger’s Cat, in that Sasha will frequently sit quietly in bed waiting for us to get her up. It’s like she’s both asleep and awake, and could reveal herself to be either at any moment, but we never really know until we open the door.

Everyone in the world now is marrying Asian women, whether they want to or not. Yes, it’s true! But that doesn’t mean the experience of having kids with Asians is uniform across the globe. For instance, Sascha Matuszak of ChengduLiving.com (who actually lives in Shanghai, go figure) is wrangling with his parents over what his marriage to a Chinese woman means:

My parents were and probably to a much lesser extent still are convinced that Bean (the pet name by which I call my wife) got pregnant on purpose. Either to keep me in her life or to get a green card, but basically on purpose. I’m not exactly sure how she did it, but I guess she told her anti-sperm defenses to stand down and informed her egg that the first lil Sascha that staggered through the phelopian was to be gobbled up. Immediately.

It was my fault too I guess, but only for getting duped by the manipulative Asian woman desperately trying to leave her Third World Country for the golden fields of grain in the USA. This whole spiel is something we hear every so often from expats and perhaps also their families and it does exist, this Asian Woman using sex with a Western Man to improve her situation and my parents have heard it and seen it enough to assume that it could be the case with Bean and I.

For me, this is kind of fascinating, as his situation is almost directly the inverse of mine. Whereas my parents were totally accepting of Jean, her parents were (and to a much lesser extent still are) skeptical of me—an impoverished writer who happened not to be Taiwanese.

In fact (and here is where we get to the point of this pointless post), I wrote about this a year ago, for Saveur magazine, in “Taipei, Family Style,” an article that, I learned the other day, is now a finalist for a James Beard Award. So, when you’re done commiserating with Sascha in Shanghai, please send bribes—in the form of cash and black truffles—to any Beard judges you happen to meet at the local Mickey D’s.

I didn’t grow up in a religious family, and I’ve only evinced an interest in Judaism in my adulthood. As such, I didn’t engage in most of the primary spiritual rites that describe a Jewish life: I had a circumcision but not a bris, no bar mitzvah, no Kosher, no nothing.

Until now. The research for my book, Am I a Jew?, brought me last weekend to the home of a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Monsey, New York, where I spent the sabbath with his friends, acquaintances, and eleven children.

Now, keep in mind, this was for research, a way for me to get a feel for how Orthodox Jewish people go about their religious business. In that regard, I learned a lot: on Purim, apparently, observant Jews have a positive obligation to get drunk. This, I must admit, is a part of the religion I didn’t know, and that Jewish religious leaders interested in propagating the faith might do more to inform people about. I learned that Orthodox Jews—or at least some of them—believe that evolution is referenced in the Torah, that Judaism isn’t a religion (it’s a “relationship”), and according to one young man I met, a seasonal worker in a kosher wine factory, it is important to “rock on” with Hashem (that’s God) in order that we might take our spiritual life “to another level.” None of this came up in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

One thing I had expected, and which didn’t disappoint, is that Orthodox Jews can do some praying. In Hebrew. Which I don’t read. So a good portion of my stay in Monsey was spent listening to people wearing small black caps mumble in an ancient language. Occasionally, all those assembled would shout “amein” in unison, click their feet tight together, take a few steps forward … and then fall back into the inscrutable mumbling.

During one of these episodes the rabbi, a gregarious and welcoming fellow, ceased mumbling and turned to me. “Did you have a bar mitzvah?” he asked. No, I said. “You want one?”

One of the key elements, I think, of journalism is the ability to say yes. I didn’t really want a bar mitzvah. But I wanted to be able to write about it for my book (which I will, in greater detail than found here). After only a moment’s hesitation, I agreed.

It was something of a quickie process: I was hauled up in front of the other men (the women were in the kitchen) and asked to repeat a few prayers. I did and then the rabbi asked me if I had a Hebrew name. I didn’t. He asked did I have one in mind, perhaps. On the spur of the moment I mentioned that I had found inspiration for my book in reading one of the great works of Jewish philosophy, The Guide for the Perplexed, a challenging and confusing tome written in the 12th century by the Jewish Aristotelian scholar, Maimonides, or Moses ben-Maimon, or the “Rambam” (an acrostic—Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Rambam), or Moshe, son of Maimon.

“Moshe it is,” the rabbi said, seizing on my answer. “What’s your father’s Hebrew name?” I wasn’t sure he had one, so the rabbi said I would be Moshe ben-Avraham, or “son of Abraham,” which is another name for all Jews, who are believed to be descended from the Biblical patriarch.

They wrapped me in a prayer shawl, again with the praying, and then I was a man. The joyous conclusion occurred when candies were passed around and I was pelted by man and boy alike, this last, a nod to the fact that a bar mitzvah is a blessing from God, one that exempts Jewish men from Judaism’s worse punishment—stoning to death. They stoned me, then, with sucking candies.

Whole thing took all of ten minutes.