The World Isn’t Entirely Awful

Theodore’s assertion this morning—The Entire World Is Awful—was kind of a downer, wasn’t it? While I’m sure he meant well, I’ve come across a couple of pieces of evidence that the world, while still mostly shit, has a couple of good points. For example, did you know that children “still enjoy playing traditional games like skipping and clapping in the playground despite the lure of mobile phones, computer games, and television”?

It’s true! So say British researchers at the Universities of East London, Sheffield and the Institute of Education:

Their study showed that children still spend their school breaktimes singing the songs that have been circulating for decades, although they sometimes update them by inserting references to the latest pop stars and soap characters.

Dancing also remains a favorite playground pastime, but children now like to base their routines on acts like Michael Jackson or Disney’s hit film “High School Musical,” they said.

Other classic activities still drawing in the crowds at playtime include tig, skipping, clapping, rhymes and make-believe games, while the hula-hoop is making a come-back.

The hula-hoop! You know, for kids!

Still, I wonder if the games of my own childhood have survived into the modern era. Do kids still play “Smell My Finger”? Or “Beat the Geek”? Or “Hey, Matt, Go Tell That Kid Whose Dad Just Died That His Dad’s a Gigolo”? The heartwarming answer, I have to assume, is yes.

But if that doesn’t convince you the world has its good points, there’s also this:

The Entire World Is Awful


And not just because I’m going to meet with my accountant today. No, there really is crappy stuff out in the world, and not all of it earthquake-related, either (BTW–to those friends and relatives who sent messages and phone calls of concern–Tomoko’s family is fine, they were in a different part of Japan, but thanks).

Even in our little parenting corner of the world, burdened with entitlement, overwhelmed with minor and irrelevant anxieties, comically and perhaps cosmically fraught with bad choices, bad decisions, and bad ju-ju–some shit is still just really bad.

Case in point: don’t sue the pre-school for harming your 4-year-old’s chances of getting into an Ivy League School:

Impressed by the school’s pledge to ready its young students for the ERB – a test used for admission at top private elementary schools – Imprescia enrolled her daughter at York in 2009.

A month into this school year, she transferred the child out of the upper East Side center because she had been lumped in with 2-year-olds.

“Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all, but just one big playroom,” the suit says.

Imprescia’s court papers suggest the school may have damaged Lucia’s chances of getting into a top college, citing an article that identifies preschools as the first step to “the Ivy League.”

Don’t! It’s wrong! It’s stupid! But if you do don’t let your lawyer anything like this:

“Lucia Imprescia, for the record, will get into an Ivy League school, York Avenue Preschool notwithstanding,” said Paulose, of Koehler & Isaacs.

Remember, karma’s a bitch. Don’t agree? Read this, from McSweeney’s, which lays out, rather intelligently, I think, the case against karma and her machinations.

Men’s Rights: Not as ridiculous as it sounds

It’s fairly easy to dismiss the men’s rights movement (so-called) as a bunch of angry middle-aged men in kilts who couldn’t afford the sports car when the midlife crisis hit (hear me, Nathan?). How can one really argue that men are an aggrieved population within society that needs a movement to protect its rights?

Which is why I read articles like this one, from the Good Men Project, entitled “How Feminists Get the Men’s Movement Wrong,” with a fair amount of skepticism:

Men’s rights and feminism are not incompatible aims. I’ve seen wrestling programs defunded as a result of Title IX, have heard feminist professors attack anthropologists not for unsound research but for the “dangerous implications” of their findings, and I’ve seen bad decisions in family court make a good father weep. And none of this made me any less thankful for Lily Ledbetter, or less outraged by the proposal to defund Planned Parenthood.
Gender politics is not a subscription service. You don’t just pick a team to root for and then disregard arguments from every other angle. If our interest is equality, we must also examine issues where the paradigm is counterintuitive or unclear.

All fair, but again, not entirely compelling. But here comes the part where I’m a hypocrite: I have had my own moment when I felt that I was discriminated against as a man, and it was in this context that much of the men’s rights movement functions: the divorce and family courts.

During the period of open confrontation between my ex-wife and me, there was significant tension over how our shared custody was going to work. It was never outright war, exactly, but there were times when I thought we might end up in front of a judge fighting for custody.

In New York, and perhaps other places (I’ve only been divorced in one state so far), there is no such thing as joint custody in a contested divorce. If you can’t resolve issues on your own, a judge will do it for you—by awarding full custody to one parent. This makes custody disputes a very high-stakes game, one in which women have a tremendous advantage.

Now, this is a blog, so of course I’ve done liitle research on the outcomes of contesting custody with young children in New York. I leave those efforts to paid reporters. But I do know this: my attorney always told me that no matter what happened I would have to compromise with JP’s mother, because if we went to court I would lose.

Judges, she said, rarely award custody to men when children are in the “tender years,” that is, under 5. Our merits as parents were irrelevant. If we went to court I would lose. (The tender years doctrine, as it is known, supposedly no longer exists, as it’s a fairly obvious instance of gender discrimination; but I’ve yet to meet a divorce attorney who believes it’s really no longer a factor.)

Again, I’m not entirely making the argument that men are in a truly disadvantaged position, or at least not all men: I’ve read that 80 percent of custody cases are resolved without dispute and with custody awarded to the mother. That is, eight times out of ten the man thinks it’s best for his children to be with the mother rather than with him.

Fortunately, in my case, I didn’t end up in that 80 percent, and I never tested the tender years doctrine. My ex and I made an arrangement in JP’s best interest. But I often think about what could have happened. Which I guess makes me an advocate for men’s rights after all.

We Need to Talk About Nathan

Because we’ve now been writing this blog for a while—this will be, most likely, post no. 1286—you readers might have the sense that Theodore, Nathan and I are, on some level, best buddies. Or at least know each other well IRL. This is what I thought, too. The sad reality, though, is that our lives, and the lives of our families, most often intersect here on the blog, and that to some extent we keep our true selves hidden. I came to this clearly belated conclusion after reading “Change We Can (Almost) Believe In,” Nathan’s latest opus for his former employer, Time Magazine, which just went live online over the weekend.

In the article, Nathan subjects himself to Ashtanga yoga, the personality breaking-down-and-rebuilding Landmark Forum, and a big dollop of Southwest New Age mysticism—all in the hopes of making himself a better man. But why? What was wrong with the old Nathan? Let’s hear it from the better-man himself:

I just turned 35 and have been hounded by enough “is this all there is” thoughts in the past year to constitute a sort of pre-midlife crisis. I love my wife, love my kids. But I’m less thrilled about myself and my default noir outlook on life. Like a lot of guys my age, I feel stalled a long way from happiness.

Nathan, not happy? Say it ain’t so! Around DadWagon HQ, we know him as the guy who out-works (in Spanish, Russian, and occasionally English) and often out-drinks us, and has managed to do it with two kids longer than either Theodore and I have had any kids at all. A noir outlook? Isn’t that what we all strive for, both here on the blog and in New York at large? Isn’t that the only way of coping with the flooded basements, restaurant blowouts and savage inequalities of life? And Nathan wants to change that?

Okay, fine. He begins with the Landmark Forum, whose instructor immediately calls bullshit:

When I stepped to the mike at Landmark, I thought I could start by offering a mild testimonial. Something true but not as intimate or confusing as confessing to losing my temper with a doe-eyed 2-year-old. So I said, blandly, that even as a freelancer, I still felt unable to make enough time for my kids. Smith immediately gutted even that disclosure. There’s no such thing as being torn between work and family, he said. Either someone is with one’s family or not. All I was really doing was using the pretext of immovable scheduling conflicts to gloss over the fact that I, of my free will, was not keeping promises I had made to my children.

Well, yeah, Nathan. You rage at a doe-eyed 2-year-old is what most people would consider normal. Why, just today I was screaming at my own 2-year-old to shut up in the backseat of our damn ZipCar. It happens, and the Landmark dude was right to delve deeper—to go after your guilt. Which makes me wonder: What are you guilty about, Mr. Thornburgh? What dark secrets lurk in your heart?

Most brutally and tragically, Nathan also experiments (and, as far as I can tell, continues to experiment with) that most dangerous of all self-betterment programs, yoga. To be specific, Ashtanga yoga:

There is almost no talking. Everyone works at his or her own pace. The more advanced you are, the more your poses look like Dante’s description of the damnation of fortune tellers: “mute and weeping” bodies with “their faces twisted toward their haunches.” Also: students are allowed to breathe only through the nose. There is no music.

Now, I should probably not say too much about yoga here. Close friends and family members are devoted to the practice (in varying degrees), and I’ve been known to engage in it, usually while traveling, usually as a sop to the desires of other people. I will not say whether I actually enjoyed it. (Okay, I did.) But having done so, I know as well that self-betterment—except in the form of increased flexibility and the ability to check out one’s female co-practitioners without seeming to be checking them out—is not the point. In this country, it’s now just exercise—and a martial one, if Nathan is to be believed.

So, Nathan: You did some exercise, minimized your crimes to a lifestyle coach, and searched for angels in Sedona? Were you really hoping to become a better man, or was this merely a ruse to get Time to accommodate your wacky lifestyle? (In which case, I applaud the effort; such schemes are my stock-in-trade.) But frankly, unless there is some demon inside you who’s making your family life a hellscape, I’m calling bullshit, too. You’re the same Russified, chain-smoking nihilist we’ve known and loved for a while now, and your attempt to convince us otherwise is as manipulative as, oh, I don’t know, a Red Sea yogini dangling newborns like marionettes.

Or, to put it in words your children would understand: We like you just the way you are.