October 30, 2007

The Math Geeks And Me

The Math Geeks are a tough crowd. Several weeks ago I submitted my post Beyonce and I Fail Division to a couple of sites that were publishing articles about mathematics. I thought the mathematicians would enjoy a comical diversion from the rigors of string theory as well as a peek into the world of sixth grade Everyday Mathematics homework.

It turns out that the readers of these particular math sites may be skilled at equations, but they don’t appreciate them being treated as a source of humor.

The Math Geeks were dejected that I wasn’t overjoyed about the opportunity to perform long division at ten o’clock at night with my surly sixth-grade son. A software engineer at Google who posted the articles said about mine:

I was very surprised - and depressed - when I received that as a submission …. Not just that an adult had a problem with something as simple as basic arithmetic, like long division, but that they thought that it was so benign, so unremarkable that the weren’t even embarassed to advertise the fact in public, and to actually submit it to a collection of math articles.

(ellipses mine, grammar and “spelling” his)

His was a mild-mannered comment compared with what followed.

Professor Jonathan Vos Post read my list of other mathematical gymnastics that will face Finn in the future, such as multiplying negative numbers by other negative numbers and dividing fractions, concluded that I am unable to perform these feats myself, and labeled me an “innumerate adult.”

I was content to let this go unchallenged because I don’t walk around bragging on my math skills, but the professor continued, writing an excruciating diatribe in which he congratulated himself on his teaching methods, referenced Sputnik and Pearl Harbor, then drew a connection between my column and his assertion that “the USA is losing the new space race, and the economic race, and the outsourcing race, and the respect of the world.”

The professor declared: “This is a crisis. It goes beyond an adult acting as if arithmetic, which my son mastered by age 7, was incomprehensible black magic, and posting that on a blog thread. But the two are linked.”

(emphasis mine, vacillating verb tenses his)

At first I thought the professor was giving me too much credit. After all, I’m just a forty-year-old mom of three, blogging with 75% of my brain while the other 25% (or one fourth) (or .25) hopes that the rattle in my minivan is an aberration, not a death knell.

But then I read up on the Professor and his credentials and discovered he’s not full of shit, or if he is, it’s the type of shit I know nothing about.

That’s when I realized, “Well, hell’s bells! It’s time someone appreciated the major impact of my blog, not only in My Tiny Kingdom, but on the world as a whole.”

Now that I’ve read what the professor had to say about me, I confess I’m a little disappointed in those of you who comment here regularly. Sure, you alerted me when my boys were eating too much tuna and you let me know that Alabama doesn’t have a monopoly on live bait vending machines. You laughed with us at our potty-training strategy. And several of you commented on that very post to explain the rule for moving decimals before dividing them.

But none of you have so much as hinted that my columns are linked to the weakness in the housing market, the lack of quality programming on television, or Pokemon.

You have been underestimating me, at your peril.

**********************

A year ago in My Tiny Kingdom (not my best mothering moment): Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Whose Laundry System Has Been Screwed With

October 29, 2007

How Close Friends Know They’re Aging

My Artistic Friend had a birthday last week.  I keep a stash of things I pick up during the year to give as gifts, but as I started to wrap her present, I had a sinking feeling that I’d given her the same thing last year.

So I called her.

Artistic Friend: “Hello?”

Absentminded Me:  “Happy Birthday!  I was wondering, did I give you something having to do with chickens for your birthday last year?”

AF: (mystified) “Like a casserole?”

Me: “No, more like something that features chickens doing things.”

AF: “I don’t think so.  But don’t feel bad; two other friends have called since Friday wondering if they’d already given me the new Frank Stitt cookbook.  And they had.”

That made me feel somewhat better.

The book I gave her was Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same: The Life and Times of Some Chickens.

It’s hilarious and a perfect gift for your friends.  What, did you think I was going to give her a statue of a chicken or something?

Two years ago in My Tiny Kingdom: Porter Considers George Michael

October 24, 2007

Mourning But Moving On

This Friday, the 26th, is the second anniversary of my mom’s death. Here is the first column I wrote about her death, and “A Blessing” provides a few more details. Here is what I wrote about the occasion last year.

You’ll see that some of these columns have tags under them– you can click on the tag “ovarian cancer” to locate other posts discussing my mom and her disease.

If you live in Alabama and you want to support research efforts for ovarian cancer, you can go to your county license plate office and ask the clerk for a commitment to purchase a special plate demonstrating your support. The plate costs $50, and $41.25 of that goes to the Oncology/Gynecology Department at UAB. This department performed my ovarian cancer risk assessment and is top-notch.

In Jefferson County you can go to the main courthouse or any satellite office and get in the tag line to fill out the paperwork. The $50 is tax deductible. The number to call is 205 856 8815.

You can also donate directly through the Norma Livingston Ovarian Cancer Foundation.

I’d appreciate it if readers in other Alabama counties would use the comments to provide information about the procedure to follow to obtain an ovarian cancer license plate in your neck of the woods. For those of you in other states, if you know of a special way to assist ovarian cancer research, please share. Please limit your causes to ovarian cancer, please.

Although I’ll be helping raise funds for Parkinson’s disease Friday, I’ve set aside some time to meet with my pastor and to think about my mom. As I raise my boys,  I continually see how much I was influenced by her, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that.

Take Off Your Pants

“Hell’s bells!  Those are way too short.  Take them off immediately and put them in Drew’s pile,” I told Porter.  He wiggled out of them and tossed them into the mountain of capri-length pants he’d already tried on.

Later I dismissed him and summoned my mac daddy.   Drew and I went through Porter’s discards and were delighted to score seven pair of wearable pants, plus three pair of jeans from the Finn era, as Porter refuses to wear blue jeans.

The boys went back outside and amused each other by kicking soccer balls at each other on the trampoline, while I stayed inside, patiently crossing the “P’s” out of waistbands and replacing them with “D’s” in black Sharpie.

The boys have grown at breakneck speed.  Wrists and ankles dangle out of shirts and pants, hair and toenails always need trimming.  I look at their faces and see more of the teens they’ll be than the toddlers they were.

The seasonal Sharpie waistband ritual is yet another reminder of how quickly time passes– at times the minutes crawl, but the years are gathering speed.

Porter in flood pants

Drew in flood jeans

October 21, 2007

My Mac Daddy And Me

When Drew asked me what a Mac Daddy was, I was stunned by the question, but I swiftly recovered and said confidently, “A Mac Daddy is a man who dresses in fancy suits and plays drums in a jazz band.”  Drew and I hadn’t had the sex talk yet, and I saw no reason to enlighten him about the world of pimps and whores.

“Could he play the bass instead of the drums?” Drew asked hopefully.  He’s been taking bass lessons for three months and is learning to accompany Porter on the first verse of “Free Fallin’.”  They’re improving, though slowly.

“Of course he can,” I said.  Although I’d originally defined a Mac Daddy as a drummer, there was no reason he couldn’t play the bass, the tuba, or the ukulele for that matter.

Later I heard Drew practicing his bass, and I went downstairs to gauge his progress.  While earlier Drew had been in his soccer uniform, he’d traded this in for full Mac Daddy regalia– a black velvet suit and hat with leopard trim.  He’d tucked some Monopoly money into his hat brim, and the bills trembled with each pluck of the strings.  The clothing was fit to be worn only by Prince in concert or a pimp on his rounds, certainly not by a third grader practicing his guitar.

“Whoa.  That is some fancy outfit,” I said slowly, wondering why I hadn’t thought to ask Drew earlier about his sudden interest in Mac Daddies.  “Where’d that come from?”

“Party City,” Drew said.  “I decided not to be a Ninja this year because I’ve been one for like five years, and then I saw this costume and I asked Daddy if I could get it and he said he didn’t care what I got as long as it fit and we made a decision in less than five seconds and I tried it on and it was my size.  Porter got a scary costume that pumps real blood but it was too big for me and I decided I liked this one better anyway because I could wear a suit more places than a bloody mask.”

When I was back upstairs fixing dinner, I thought about the previous day.  Bill and I had a whole list of errands to run, and he took the boys with him to Home Depot and then Party City for Halloween costumes while I went to buy new towels and groceries.  I had been ecstatic to score the Publix run in lieu of the tortuous Halloween costume outing.

Party City has an obnoxious, complicated system, in which hyperactive children view a huge board with pictures of all the available costumes, select just one (with extreme difficulty) and scream their choice to their parents.  The parent memorizes the code that corresponds to the desired ensemble, then joins the line to retrieve the costume.

The code is important– you can’t request “The red Ninja in a Child’s Small, please”– you must instead ask for “TX329278 in a Child’s Small” and hope for the best.

The parent relays the code to a bored employee, who conveys it to someone in the warehouse, and the crowd gathers with anticipation to learn the results.  Is the Viking
available in a 3T, or only a Child’s Medium?  If the child’s size isn’t in stock, as is often the case, the weeping kid must be escorted back to the pictures to make another choice and go through the entire grueling process again.

Experienced mothers might check their children out of school to avoid the crowds and lower the stress level of the event, and would remember to bring pen and paper for recording codes and sizes.  Only a first-timer would show up in the middle of a Saturday with multiple children expecting a painless, or even pleasant, experience.  Bill was a virgin Halloween costume buyer.

That night after errands were finished, Bill and I went out for gimlets, and he complained about the crowds at Party City, the difficulty he had persuading Porter to commit to a costume, and the lack of available sizes.  But he failed to mention that the situation was so desperate that he allowed Drew to choose a pimp suit and Porter an outfit that apparently squirted blood, and that I still hadn’t seen.

I’ve braved the Party City nightmare multiple times, but have I returned with sex slaves and dripping carcasses?  Of course not.  I’ve nixed all requests for even vaguely inappropriate costumes, and have purchased every Ninja costume available over the past decade.

When Bill got home from work, I asked him what the hell he was thinking letting Drew purchase a pimp outfit.  He looked at me, confused, and said, “Honey, Party City kicked my ass.  I don’t know what costumes we bought.”

Bill was simply beaten down by the crowds and chaos at Party City, and escaped with the first costume he could obtain that both satisfied and fit the costumee.  He was astounded to learn that he’d purchased a pimp suit and a bloody mask, and not very penitent either.

“It was a circus in there,” he said.  “We’ll just tell Drew he can’t wear a pimp suit for Halloween and make him think of something else.  He can wear those old overalls and tie a bandanna to a stick and be a hobo.”

The problem with that approach, obviously, was that I had already told Drew that a Mac Daddy was a musician, not a pimp, and he’s been donning his velvet suit every time he practices the bass.  He also asked if he could wear his new suit to his guitar lesson the following day.  I’d refused based on the weather, pointing out that it was going to be 89 degrees and that velvet was traditionally considered a cold weather fabric.

We have little more than a week to go before Halloween, and I’m having difficulty sleeping.  If my doorbell rang and I opened the door to see a tiny pimp politely asking for candy, I’d think dark, condemning thoughts about the mother who let her son out of the house dressed so inappropriately.

Can a pimp who thinks he’s a musical Mac Daddy go trick-or-treating in the Tiny Kingdom without raising eyebrows?   Will the entire Glamore family suffer social repercussions?

Perhaps I’ll put on some black fishnet hose, stilettos, and dig up a slinky black dress of questionable taste.  I’ll top it all off with bright lipstick and gaudy jewelry and I’ll accompany Drew on his Halloween rounds.  My Mac Daddy and me– we’ll show the Kingdom how Halloween is done.