The Tantrum, Part 2: Should DadWagon Get a Job?

Consider this a mini-Tantrum. Usually, all three of the Wagoneers weigh in on a single tantrum topic. Matt already wrote his post about whether or not to get a job (synapsis: he is tempted). But Theodore was exempted from writing, since he actually made his opinion known in the most emphatic way possible: by taking a severance package and leaving Harper’s Magazine this week.

That leaves me alone to say: DadWagon should not get a job. Particularly if it’s a job they really, really like.

I had, perhaps, the jobbiest-job of the bunch, since Time Magazine is, safe to say, a more corporate working environment than Harper’s. It involved me putting on a button-down shirt (and even a tie sometimes, though I did show up at a lunch with Ban Ki Moon and the bosses of Time Inc. once without even wearing a jacket–oops). I took the subway into work during rush hours, with all the other sleepy professionals, and got off at Rockefeller Center, where I would trudge with the same mudflow of officeworkers every day. It was more of a “job” than anyone in my direct family line has held for several generations.

And in my own way, I made as emphatic a statement as I could about that lifestyle–if not about that particular magazine, whom I still write for and whose staff and editors I still admire–when I quit in 2009.

I had worked a lot of jobs going through school and in the years afterwards. I did construction, I taught high schoolers, I washed dishes and shoveled snow. None of them was a good fit for me, a person with little patience and a weak back. I once put on a suit and spent a year selling educational programs to school districts, failing so horribly that I sold somewhere in the vicinity of $3000 of product, not even a tenth of what my base salary was.

But the most dangerous job of all, to me and my family, was the one I loved. It was a tremendous privilege to work at Time Magazine. It’s a heavy brand, and it had the resources to send me around the country and occasionally overseas to write and report stories. I wanted to do well by them. I took on every assignment I was offered, and thereby wound up editing and, to a certain degree, managing people. The office at Rockefeller Center became a warm–if incredibly brightly lit–second home. My enthusiasm for the job conspired, with caffeine and insomnia, to keep me in the office up to 80 hours a week, until 3 or 4 in the morning. And I was often not the only one there that late.

I didn’t have any ephiphanic moments when my first kid was born. It took longer for me, a couple years really, to understand what parenting is about for me. That is, I realized that although many of my colleagues had made peace with working insane hours as their families moved forward, it just wouldn’t work for me. I respect the hell out of them, and the work they do and the choices they make. But I found myself not wanting to be at the office every day all day. I am prone to sentimentality and regret, which means that not only do I not get to see my kids, but I feel like I’m doing them and me some irreplaceable disservice by not being around them. And in a place that makes as many demands–rightfully so–on its editors and writers as Time does, not wanting to be in the office when you have to be there is not good for anybody.

So I left. Besides this blog, I’m more or less doing the same work, but I make a lot less than I used to (thanks for getting my back, wife!). And there are plenty of the garden-variety frustrations that freelancers have: you have to constantly motivate yourself in the face of what feels like the unmovable indifference of the (non-Time) editors of the world.

But the other side of the ledger is strong. My kids have never had to be taken to the doctor or the hospital by a babysitter. I cook for them–not often enough, but more often than I did. Aside from the times when I am traveling, I get to have an actual morning routine with them. I know my son’s favorite games, his favorite color, what new words he’s learned today. I get to see my daughter’s rapid ascent up the evolutionary tree first hand, from the protozoa she was at birth to a five-year-old who can act a lot like a homo sapiens teenager. I don’t pretend that I am spending this time or doing these things for their sake–lord knows they are free to resent my presence later on in life. I do it for myself, in part as a way of minimizing my own potential future regrets.

I did, thanks to my continued amity with Time, have a chance to reprise the office life for almost all of last week. It was almost exactly as I had left it: great to see everyone, great to be in meetings where decisions are being made, and a poor fit for me overall. From Tuesday morning to Thursday evening, I didn’t see my kids. That’s partly because it takes me so long to finish my work, partly because there’s so much else to do–meetings, mini-conferences, quick huddles in an office.

I was there. It was good. But it’s better to be home.

The “Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight With Dad” Act

This Act comes too late for Meleanie Hain, gun-rights activist and soccer mom. In 2009, her husband somehow got the drop on her in a murder-suicide (Jim Zengerle/ Lebanon Daily News)

I had lunch with my cousin in New York this week, and it turns out that friends of his know the father at the center of the most awful thing I’ve ever heard.

You might have seen the story: Julie Powers Schenecker shot her teenage son in the head “because he was talking back” (according to MSNBC) and then drove home and did the same to his older sister while she worked at her computer. All this while the father was deployed overseas with the Army.

It’s such an awful thing that even I, an amateur curator of dark thoughts and suspicions, could only bear reading about it in little sips.

Not that being twice or thrice-removed from the father in question gives me any insight into this. But if I may, I’d like to make a modest proposal about guns.

When I was reporting in Tucson after the Loughner shooting, there was much talk from certain sectors about how a better-armed public could have prevented the killings. The President of the Arizona Senate, Russell Pearce–perhaps the most powerful politician in the state–said in his first interview after the shooting that “guns save lives.” We need to be armed in a place like Safeway, the argument goes, to protect ourselves from fellow Tucsonans. Or, following the logic of a law of a 2010 bill passed in the Arizona legislature allowing concealed weapons on college campuses, we need professors to be able to shoot down a coed in a pinch. And so on.

But we also know that the largest percentage of violent crimes against children are perpetrated not by neighbors or other students, but by family members. In Florida, as the crime rate has fallen, domestic violence murders have risen. They comprised almost 20% of the murders in 2010, a stat that probably makes your relatives–mom or dad or son or daughter–a more likely murderer than any other category (teacher, robber, drug dealer, etc.)

So this is my modest proposal: let’s rename some of these concealed-carry laws to honor their most likely use. Call them something like colloquial like the Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight With Dad Act. Or perhaps something in legislative-speak, like the 2011 Intrafamilial Protection Act. Let people know that the Second Amendment means never having to go down without a fight in your own home.

The beauty, of course, is that you can just rename. You don’t have to actually pass new laws. In most places in America, you are already free to own a weapon in your home, even if you live with kids, so that on one bright blue morning you can, like Julie Powers Schenecker, load it, take it in the car with you, and in a moment of madness, do incredible violence to everything you’ve ever loved.

Now that’s freedom.

A Good Day

Not Sasha, but cute anyway.

Is there anything worse than taking a child to the dentist? I mean, it’s gotta be pretty bad for the kid, but for the parents—wow, the existential dread that arises when you wait around the office, anticipating the shitstorm that’s about to blow, the tears, the kicking, the cajoling, the misery. That is pretty awful.

Except that yesterday, somehow, it all went well. Not just well but perfectly. Sasha, who had the day off from preschool thanks to Chinese New Year, had her first real dentist’s appointment, on the 22nd floor of a building in downtown Brooklyn. The appointment started 30 minutes late, and during that time I began to worry. Sure, Sasha was having fun with the little plastic toys—fairies and ballerinas and dinosaurs and pointless half soccer balls—but there was no way that could last.

And yet it did. And when we finally got called in to have her teeth cleaned, then prodded and inspected, she was a model patient, opening her mouth without complaint, thanking everyone, and accepting her xylitol lollipop reward gracefully. I was stunned.

But no more stunned than I was throughout the day. We went to two—count ’em! two!—restaurants, for lunch and dinner, and at both she sat down and got to work eating pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, and, finally, Singapore mee hoon. At naptime, too, she lay down without a problem. What the fuck was up with this kid?

To be fair, this wasn’t the Day of No Tears I’ve been dreaming of. She was not particularly happy that I let her watch only one episode of “Ni Hao, Kai-lan!” But really, that was the only complaint she made in a very busy day.

Also: I certainly don’t expect this behavior to continue. In fact, I predict a tantrum or two this weekend. Not for any specific reason. Just because. But now, at least, when things go wrong, I can remember this day and the potential the kid showed for acting like a grown-up. Well, like a grown-up who enjoys a good fart joke now and then.

How to Give a Pullover a Bris

From our faithful Russian tipster, comes this video called “Elena Malysheva and the Member” that our tipster says “has had Moscow laughing all week.” That is, of course, no mean feat: Moscow hasn’t laughed for an entire week since Sean Connery tried to speak with a Russian accent.

There’s not much to add to this lovely video. The older woman is Malysheva, a well-known TV host who has a show called “Health” on Russia’s Channel One. I don’t know who the other people are, but the Jew (a mohel, I presume?) looks like he couldn’t be less comfortable if Malysheva was cutting his beard instead of that woman’s, umm, foreskin. I know the klezmer music was an especially awkward touch.

The sprinkles on her hair? Those are microbes, Malysheva explains, that get gunked up in the foreskin and cause infections in little boys. Never mind the uncertainty surrounding health benefits of circumcision: the use of sprinkles in this woman’s hair was an inspired piece of pop-medicine. Dr. Oz take note.

Also, as the callout points out midway through the clip, Malysheva not only manages to give this woman’s pullover a bris, but she also cuts off a chunk of her hair. All genius.