First... Monday... EVER
This morning we took the whole family out (there are five us us... six if you count my alter ego). Our mission: to rid ourselves of one of our children. The winnowing process would involve a series of increasingly difficult/disgusting stunts/ingestions. The winner(s) stay, the loser goes into the White Slavery section of e-Bay until sold.

No, seriously, we did get rid of one, but only temporarily.

My oldest boy started his first day of kindergarten today.

As we watched him walk away, oblivious to the tedium and torment of thirteen years of school--not to be confused with education--I was shocked at my failure to collapse into a nervous breakdown. You would think that handing my oldest over, this boy whose very existence has largely defined my own for the past 5+ years, would have elicited something, anything, of some potency out of me.

But no, not really. Just a general sense of relieved contentment while Mrs. Pops wiped the tears away next to me.

I was worried that this meant that secretly I was part (possibly all) automaton, that my mother had built me in her garage thirty years ago to live among you humans, to observe from a cold, detached distance without being able to feel or even completely comprehend your strange, illogical "emotion".

But then I thought, no, I do have feeling, I simply reserve them all for myself.

For instance, I woke up to an alarm for the first time since May 20, 1999, two days before my boy was born. 6:30 am, just like a person with a job, which was more than a little troubling.

Also, it struck me that now I am officially old. There are lots of things that we're supposed to take as markers to signal our passage from childhood to adulthood. Nothing will do that quite like having to write "PTA Meeting" on your calendar. Not getting your driver's license, not your first beer, your first date, voting, registering for the draft, your first Vegas trip, the first time you kill a homeless guy with your car, nothing really compares.

That's it. I've arrived. I'm now officially an adult.

In all, this is my excuse why I have yet to watch a single minute of the Republican National Convention from NYC. Lots of errand-type driving coupled with profound existential crisis. That's a full day right there.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.4


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 3:05 PM