Rubik's Hair

I have noticed a resurgence lately, utterly inexplicable to me, of Rubik's cube. I was a teenager the first time around; I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now.

As I was considered a bright kid -- the best part of high school is probably the fact that your intelligence is judged almost solely by grades -- and had a certain affinity for games, it was probably inevitable that the cube and I would go a couple rounds. I can tell you for sure, though, that I never laid a glove on it.

I read an article not long ago about some of the top solvers. In fact, one of them was on Beauty and the Geek last year. And it was one of the beauties, as it happens... no, of course that's a lie. Rubik's cube has become one of the reliable geek-indicators, on par with the legendary pocket protector, a fondness for Dungeons and Dragons, and a record of regular attendance at Star Wars conventions.

This guy's claim to fame is that he can solve it in something like 10 seconds with his hands behind his back. My claim is that even if I'm looking directly at it, it takes me more than 10 seconds just to get the rows lined up enough so I can turn the thing... although for me, there's no hurry since I know it's not going to do any good anyway.

I actually picked one up just the other day, but I ended up setting it down and backing away slowly. I've got enough puzzles in my life as it is...

... for example: parenting itself is puzzling, and parenting a little girl is filled with mysteries. I may have mentioned this before, but once and for all: males and females may be equal, but there is no way they're identical.

As mysterious as her personality might be, perhaps the puzzle most terrifying to me is her hair. I've come to understand the way she thinks, but I don't think I'll ever get the hang of hairstyles. We have a couple of drawersful of various hair-holding devices... I was going to list them all for the proverbial comic effect, until I realized I don't really know what any of them are called or how they're used. I do know that even rubber bands are a challenge for me; even the tiniest ones have to be doubled over to hold a ponytail, but it's really hard to get that second loop around... And hairbands! You know, those plastic semicircles -- my wife says, "OK, just give her a hairband, then." I can't even get that on right; for some reason both the band & the loop stick up and she ends up looking like she's wearing one of those rabbit-ears antennas with the UHF loop in the middle.

It's really all I can do just to brush her hair, what with all the whining and crying... and she's not very happy about it either. She has long, fine hair that in the morning ends up looking like Charlie Brown's kite string. Apparently there's some kind of Secret Girl Trick in handling this stuff that I never mastered -- despite the fact that I've gone through periods (known as "high school" and "college") when my hair length was close to hers. What can I say, late 70s-early 80s, mirrors hadn't been invented yet.

Mornings around here can be fairly chaotic; we've even voluntarily increased the degree of difficulty by watching another 5-year-old before school 3 days a week. My plan goes like this:

Me:

• get up with the kids first
• make breakfasts (no easy task since my son decided he needed three each morning)
• make lunches (no easy task since my daughter is essentially a conscientious objector with regard to sandwiches)
• pack bookbags
• arbitrate disputes
• get teeth brushed
• oh yeah -- get my own shower & clothes & breakfast to get myself ready for work
• take them to the bus stop

Her:

• pick out clothes
• brush the girl's hair

Seems about even to me.

A Matter of Some Interest

My memory is far from foolproof -- it was, after all, so Very, Very Long Ago -- but as I recall it, when I went to elementary school they had pretty much all the supplies we needed. It's true that I would not have dreamed of showing up without a well-stocked pencil box, and I fondly remember the binders, notebooks, and TrapperKeepers I used (as a matter of fact, I still have a couple of my grade-school binders. But then, doesn't everyone?). However, when it came to general classroom supplies... as I remember it, they were generally supplied by the classroom.

So I was caught a bit off-guard, even taken aback, when I read my daughter's list of requested supplies for kindergarten. Absent were the pens, pencils, and crayons of days gone by -- in fact, we were specifically enjoined not to send any of these. No, the bulk of her list consisted of: four bottles of hand sanitizer, two boxes of Kleenex, and five packages of baby wipes.

It's not really surprising when Wal-Mart experiences empty shelves at the peak of the August School-Supply Shopping Season... but I really wasn't expecting it to be the shelf that (formerly) held the store-brand baby wipes.

Looking on the bright side, she has no excuse for not being cleaner than she generally is at home.

Of course, budgets are particularly tight for public institutions all over, and all the more so in a town where the original school budget was essentially voted down because the chair of the school board was annoying. We seem to find ourselves targets of "supplemental" fundraising on a regular basis (unfortunately, the "why are we paying taxes?" argument is closed off to me; since our home is owned by the church, we... um... don't actually pay school tax).

The first scam... er, project... of the school year was the well-known Magazine Subscription Sale. This would of course suggest that we send our 7- and 5-year-olds door-to-door through the neighborhood... although it could be problematic, especially considering most of those homes also have their own students selling magazine subscriptions.

Naturally, the sales drive kicks off with an assembly to hype the kids up about all the Fabulous Prizes they'll win, so it's incumbent upon us to at least make a good-faith effort to scare up some sales... and you know what they say, charity begins at home.

I'd really like it to begin somewhere else, but it may be be poor form for my wife to solicit among her parishioners (many of whom, again, already have kids or grandkids); and since I work remotely, I don't think passing the flyer around my office will do the trick.

Unfortunately, our own options are limited by the fact that we already receive at least one copy of every periodical printed in English (with the exception, of course, of the ones which were traditionally mailed in plain brown wrappers). Or so I thought.... Browsing through the list to find publications with which to stick our friends and family, my wife discovered one she thought I needed: Family Handyman.

I read something recently that said anyone using the phrase "wrong on so many levels" should be forced to list them, so allow me to elucidate:

• After all, she's the one with the ideas and the ambition, and the brand-new tools, so why is it I'm the designated fix-it guy anyway?
• Granted my maintenance skills are largely confined to changing batteries and driving picture hooks into the wall, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of an entire subscription devoted to remedying (or remodeling) my shortcomings.
• In any case, I'm pretty satisfied with my skills, such as they are. I consider myself the Ty Pennington of assembly-required furniture. And always remember the Biblical admonition, "From him to whom much has been given, much will be expected."

When I expressed my... lack of enthusiasm... for the notion, she quickly shifted gears and informed me that it didn't have to be home maintenance -- what about something like American history? She really thought it would be beneficial for me to branch out, grow, develop more interests....

I had to really take a pause and a deep breath on that one, lest my voice rise like an American Idol contestant approaching the big finish. There are a lot of things I ought to develop: I should develop a richer spiritual life; it would be great to develop some physical fitness; I daresay there are even some photos around I need to develop. I really don't need any more interests -- to be more interesting, perhaps, but I have about 3 more interests than I can handle as it is:

• reading -- books, magazines, websites
• music -- playing, listening, singing in the choir
• sports -- watching, playing, reading about, fantasy baseball
• puzzles -- crossword or Sudoku
• church -- choir, PowerPoint production

and of course, computer-related pursuits, including a blog you may be familiar with.

In fact, what I'm really interest-ed in is a way to manage all this, plus a family and a... oh yeah, job -- in the allotted 168 per week....

Drive Time

Although we have long since been sucked into the vortex of Minivan Nation, it was not always thus. We were actually looking for a new car at the time we learned we'd be adopting our son; we ended up carrying through our original plan and buying a Corolla. It was a wonderfully dependable, durable, and economical car; but at that time, at least, the Corolla was approximately the size of a twin bed.

That was fairly adequate with one small child... but with 2 of them, less small every day, it felt like it was approaching "couch" size. Then add in a (generous) pinch of sibling conflict, and it becomes a rolling phone booth.

So time once again to do the car-searching thing -- keeping in mind that one of the reasons I like Toyotas is because I have to go car-shopping that much less often. Here's the thing I really don't understand: suppose I walk into the grocery store tomorrow and steak is $3.99 a pound. So I pick out a 2-pound steak... what do you think would happen if I took it to the checkout and said, "Tell you what, I'll give you $7 for it"? Suppose further that the store had paid $5 for the steak, so they were secretly willing to sell it for $6. So even if I save a buck, I'm really spending a dollar too much. Doesn't that kind of sum up the car-buying experience?

It didn't take us too long to narrow down our search to a few, and before long (at least for me; note that another key reason I don't like car-shopping is that at the end a decision is required, and a decision costing thousands of dollars at that) we had settled on... another Toyota. Surprise!

This time we opted for a Camry, "Motor Trend's (perennial) Car of the Year". It's dependable and smooth -- and it's also bigger than my first apartment. My goal was to get the kids far enough away that I couldn't quite hear them, or at least to get them far enough away from each other that they could inflict only superficial wounds.

Last week I got to take it on the first real Road Trip; you wouldn't want me to take the van to Boston, would you? It was a little like driving my living room down the Mass Pike (as opposed to the van, which is more like being a package in one of those US Mail semis).

I even got to do one thing I can never do in my own living room: listen to the radio broadcast of the Mets game. In my childhood, before there was such a thing as cable TV, the only way to keep up with the Mets on a daily basis was radio... even later, as I went out on my own, and the Mets emerged from the funk of the late 70s-early 80s, I spent many hours in the aforementioned tiny apartment pacing and listening to the ballgame.

Local (upstate) radio stations don't carry the Mets any more, but there's something about a car radio that allows you to bring in those faraway AM stations... so I got to enjoy the flashback of listening to the game.

Unfortunately, it seemed that would be the only enjoyable part. The Mets, already fully engaged in blowing their seemingly insurmountable division lead, were in the midst of receiving a thrashing from the more-or-less hapless Washington Nationals -- and neither for the first or last time, at that. As I approached Boston, the score was 10-3 Washington, heading to the bottom of the 9th.

Then a single, a strikeout, a walk... and like a bolt from the blue, a 3-run homer. Suddenly it's 10-6, and after another hit, a pitching change. Then another hit, and a walk, and a double, and guess what -- it's 10-9.

All this time, of course, I'm still heading west -- and after the Nats change pitchers yet again, and the winning run comes to the plate, I reach my exit. Now, the Copley Plaza exit is essentially a tunnel/underpass that extends for some distance, and maybe you remember what going into a tunnel does to AM reception!

I hustled through the tunnel with my heart in my throat, but by the time I was out the other side, the second out had already occurred. By the time I turned the wrong direction off the exit, the game was over. As it turned out, it was a microcosm of the rest of the week: in suspense till the very last second before ending in crushing disappointment.

On the other hand, the ride was very comfortable (OK, physically) and I did get great gas mileage.....