Tag: Funny

Fatherhood

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Thomas is going through this phase–well, at least, I hope it’s a phase–we’re he communicates with the urgency and intensity of a drill sergeant. “Rise and shine, Dad, time to drop down and give me fifty pushups, plus turn on the TV so I can watch cartoons,” he yells into my eardrum while I try to swat him away with a pillow. Crazy thing is he never tries this early morning tactic on his mom’s side of the bed, in his mom’s ear, probably because she is such a deep and peaceful sleeper that she is incapable of awakening for anything quieter than a mild bomb blast. And if, by some small miracle, he did awaken her, she would just roll over and tell me to deal with it. It’s pretty much a tacit agreement we’ve made–my wife deals with scary sounds in the night that she thinks could be robbers and I think could be ghosts–and I deal with our son’s militaristic Saturday morning roll call.

Sometimes I think parenthood is basically 50% percent time spent wondering if you’re a good parent, 45% time spent wondering what you’re doing wrong, and 5% wondering if the hospital accidentally switched your child at birth. 

Natalie went to visit her dad this past weekend for Fathers’ Day, leaving Thomas and I behind to visit my parents. If it wasn’t for Thomas, my parents and I would still be trying to figure out where to eat dinner this past weekend. Thankfully, Thomas knows his own mind and chose Chili’s over the Mayflower Fish House, so half of his family tree, the indecisive half, didn’t starve and wither up due to indecision. 

However, Thomas’s decisiveness isn’t without its downsides, specifically when he commands the waitress, “Bring me my quesadilla now!” I’m pretty sure I heard an audible gasp arise from the surrounding tables; meanwhile, I just wanted to get under the table and hide. Who is this child? Not only did he vocalize an imperative sentence, which I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to utter until I turned 21 (and even now I still feel awkward giving commands), but he vocalized it at the top of his lungs in a public setting. 

Don’t get wrong, in some ways, I’m glad Thomas is decisive and vocal, and I hope he doesn’t grow up quite as shy as I was, but at the same time, I don’t want the waitress spitting in our food. So Thomas and I had a “discussion” in the bathroom, which was mostly me pleading with him in a bathroom stall to behave and listen, to not besmirch the Bishop family name, all while threatening him with various punishments once we get home (you name them, we’ve tried them) that seem to have a five minute half-life for effectiveness, then he just goes right back to his preferred form of communication, which is loud imperative sentences. 

This phase has been going on for a few months/eons now, and to be honest, on several occasions it’s made me wonder if I’m doing something wrong as a Dad. It wasn’t until I picked Thomas up from preschool one day that I realized that barking commands seemed to be the preferred form of communication for the entire class. 

“Do they yell at each other all day long?” I asked his teacher. 

“Yes,” she  said, exasperatedly, “but Thomas is one of the quieter ones.”

-the drill sergeant

Smell Ya Later

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

Although pant fit may be a reliable indicator that you’ve gained weight, I prefer a more holistic gauge of body mass, specifically snugness in the crawl space. I don’t go in the crawl space often, but when I do I nearly always leave with mixed feelings–I’m happy to make it out alive but I’m also depressed because the fit seems to be getting tighter with every passing year. If I ever go weeks without writing, check the crawl space–I may have gotten stuck. I wouldn’t be the first lifeform to come to a final resting place under our house. There is the dead possum skeleton near the northern most vent duct that is well on its way to being fossilized at this point. I encounter it every time I try to crawl to the territory under the far room, which is an effort in futility because the space underneath the far room tapers to a mere sliver. 

Out of desperation, I sometimes attempt an exploratory crawl, in the hopes of finding an undiscovered passage to the hinterlands, to retrieve the carcass of whatever varmint has died there. We now have a brick underpinning that keeps most critters out but every few years a woodland creature will choose a plot under our far room as its final resting place. I can’t really blame them–I can’t imagine a more secluded spot–in the last 100 years, there has been less human activity under the far room than there has been on the surface of the moon.  

Speaking of the moon, it would have been nice to have a space suit while I was crawling through the crawl space yesterday. Indeed, every few years, we have to go to war with the local skunk herd to reclaim our territory, and this was one of those years. Earlier in the spring, Natalie deployed moth balls, dish soap, and strange concoctions of essential oils and herbs–basically rudimentary witchcraft–to keep the skunks at bay until I could trap them and dispose of them. Unfortunately, one of the skunks breached our defenses, found a loose brick in our underpinning, and completed a suicide mission under our house, dying right beside the air handler for our heating and air unit. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. 

My only consolation is that it didn’t die under the far room, where I never would have been able to reach and extricate the carcass. As it stands now, I have gone back in time and am practicing social distancing again, although sometimes that is impossible like when I’m having a suspicious mole cut off my back at the dermatologist’s office. 

DERMATOLGIST: [as he cuts the mole off my back] Smells like we might have some skunks coming around the office again. 

ME: [as I’m laying on the table] Sorry, doc, it’s just me. A skunk died under our house. It’s been awful–we have barely slept at all for a week. I may just fall asleep while you’re cutting on my back, I’m so tired. 

NURSE: [tightening her mask] I read on Facebook that this is when skunks are most active.

ME: This one was definitely not active. It was dead as a doornail. I’ve got a picture of it on my phone if you want to see it.

NURSE: [putting on a second mask] No, thanks.

Image gallery image
This died under our house.
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This is me disposing of carcass.

Observations of the Unobservant

~ sanebishop ~ 9 Comments

My wife has observed that I am “unobservant,” which is a strange thing to call a man who correctly identified a picture hanging in a different spot by the second guess. Plus, my first guess was partly right–she had painted the room a new variation of beige, just two years ago and I had just now noticed. 

Apparently, I am not the only person who is unobservant. Our house sits on the side of a fork in the road. Every day, every hour, every ten minutes somebody heading upstream on the second prong fails to observe the stop sign. They crane their necks to see if anybody is coming up the primary prong, and if not, they just blow right through the stop sign. If I ever discover some priceless treasure in all my farm junk that I want to keep hidden and secure–let’s say, for instance, a Picasso painting–I would hang it on the stop sign. Sure, my wife would notice if it was hanging a little crooked, but certainly no one else would stop to steal Pablo’s work. 

“The right side is just a hair too low,” I could imagine my wife saying. 

“Nope, that is just Picasso–he liked cockeyed shoulders,” I’d reply, but it would do no good because soon she would have me retrieving the level. 

The problem is my wife observes things in the actual world, whereas I mostly just observe things in my head–and there is a lot going on in my head. In one corner, people are conversing over matters of great importance, and one of those people looks and sounds a lot like me–except my head’s version is extremely witty, articulate, and persuasive. Then in another corner of my head, all the things I need to accomplish are swirling around like a little whirlwind, battering the inside of my noggin with logistical details. In the top of my head, larger storm clouds are gathering and thunder is rumbling. With each flash of lightning on my mental horizon, I’m counting the seconds to predict how far away the costs of major life purchases are, such as the cost of replacing our cars or our twenty-year-old heating and air unit. 

In the back of my head are the stables where I keep my high horses. High horses need a lot of tending because I ride them into battle every ten minutes to vanquish all the people in my head who disagree with me. Occasionally, amidst all the vanquishing, funny thoughts pop up in my head, and, like a hound dog, I must follow those thoughts until I find the punchline or someone, usually my wife, punches me in the arm and tells me to pay attention. 

“You need to pay more attention,” she says. 

“I am paying attention, thank you very much,” I reply. “I’m paying attention to the three-ring-circus in my head, and currently the ring master is being chased by a hound dog riding a high horse in a whirlwind. It is pretty hard to pay attention when I’m the ring master.” 

I should probably spend more time learning from my four-year-old son. Thomas is the most observant person I’ve ever met, even more so than my wife. Every two seconds he is observing something in the actual world. I know this because every two seconds he is providing fresh commentary on his observations.

“There is a chair!”

“That’s great!” I say.

“There is a spider web in the corner of the room.” 

“That’s great!” I say. 

“You’ve got a hair in your nose.”

“Thomas, focus!” I say. “We’re trying to put on your socks!” 

Apparently, four-year-olds pay too much attention and forty-year-olds can’t pay enough. I’m not sure what happens between four and forty, but I’m pretty sure he observes more in sixty seconds than I do all day.

Advice from a Talking Jellyfish

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday, I was thinking, when it occurred to me that thinking is highly overrated. As far as I can tell, thinking is what humans do to make their lives miserable. To me, it seems like most one cell amoebas are happier than most humans these days, and I suspect that is because most one cell amoebas spend very little time thinking. Amoebas just exist, which is to say they just flop and plop around the microscopic world and spend little time engaged in higher thought. I would love to be able to just flop and plop onto the couch, but I can’t plop in peaceful lassitude without thinking about all the other things I ought to be doing instead. 

Winter is the worst time for thinking. It’s when thoughts pile up, like a log jam in a river. A thought jam is when your stream of consciousness can’t flow naturally because all the debris flowing downstream clogs up the neurological pathways in your head. To clear up a thought jam, it helps to engage in productive activities, like taking out the trash. But on cold rainy days, it is too dreary to take out the trash, so thoughts just pile up, as does the trash. 

The only advantage I see to thinking is that occasionally we can think about happy thoughts, often at the most inopportune times, like the time I thought about a talking jellyfish in church. He was just drifting along in my stream of consciousness, chatting about stuff, until he ran into my thought jam and voiced his displeasure with his habitat. 

JELLYFISH: It’s too muddy in here–my tentacles are getting tangled in all the deadwood floating around in your head.

ME: Wait, who is this? 

JELLYFISH: I’m the talking jellyfish you just thought about 

ME: Why am I thinking about a talking jellyfish? 

JELLYFISH: Because you’re a human, and humans have the great evolutionary advantage of conscious thought, which allows you to think about talking jellyfish. 

ME: It doesn’t feel like an advantage.

JELLFYISH: It will be if you ever need to make small talk with a jellyfish in the future because most jellyfish, myself excluded, are quite taciturn. 

ME: Geez, thanks for the insight. I think I’m supposed to be praying now. 

The problem is once you chat with a talking jellyfish while you’re supposed to be communicating with the infallible Creator of the Universe, the talking jellyfish starts to get presumptuous. For instance, you never want to listen to a talking jellyfish practice his stand up routine while your preacher is in the middle of a thorough explication of the Book of Job. If you crack even the slightest trace of a grin, the preacher will know something is up. At that point, you’re just better off feigning a seizure than falling into fit of a laughter while poor Job is being put through the wringer. That said, maybe God sends us talking jellyfish, or other such irrational thoughts, to cheer us up when our rational thoughts are rather dreary. 

The Conundrum of Ease

~ sanebishop ~ 12 Comments

Ah, yesterday I was searching for Paw Patrol on the TV, when I was momentarily swept up in nostalgia, remembering the good ole days when tasks contained a smattering of difficulty. For example, when I was a child, it was relatively difficult to change a channel on the TV. You had to get up and walk to the TV set, fiddle with knobs and switches, and realign the rabbit ears. And back then you never knew if changing the channel would be worth it because you were at the mercy of the weather and whatever the broadcasters were broadcasting. On a cloudy day, forget it. In the evening, if you were looking for cartoons, forget it–just the nightly news.

Now, with a la carte streaming, your four-year-old has endless choices at his fingertips. He knows nothing of the risk and sacrifice once involved in changing the channels–and, thus, he makes his dad’s life difficult, by constantly pleading with me to change the channel. Ease is creating a tiny monster. 

And if I look in my email inbox for work, I again see the conundrum of ease–people shooting me emails till my brain is riddled with holes. Thirty years ago, people had to put pen to paper, put the paper in an envelope, take the envelope to the post office, and wait weeks for a reply. Correspondence was a big commitment–which is why my second-grade pen pal and I only exchanged a couple of letters before we realized our correspondence was too burdensome and hardly worth the effort. Now, people fire off emails with no commitment or consequences, which make my life hard. Right when I think my brain has recovered, it’s peppered with digital birdshot.

And fast food–well, it makes life easy until it causes you to croak. Truly, I respect vegetarians–not because they abstain from eating higher life forms, but because they abstain from eating fast food. In my rural county, there are no vegetarian restaurants, fast or otherwise. 

Thus, people who can pass a Chick-Fil-A at breakfast and resist the tractor beam emanating from a chicken biscuit earn street cred in my book. Over the last few years, my cholesterol has crept up as has my pants size. Recently, I’ve been trying to pass Chick-Fil-A without stopping in the morning. I’m proud to say last week I successfully resisted putting on my turn signal, and this week I plan to work on not turning. But it is so easy to turn. 

And I think we’d all be better off if we couldn’t buy stuff so easily. In the old days, people had to go to the bank and withdraw money (if they had any) to buy stuff or either remember where they buried their money and dig up a jar filled with coins. Would a Chick-Fil-A biscuit really be worth all the trouble it would take to dig up a jar full of coins? Alas, now all we have to do is swipe a little plastic card or click once online to buy anything we can possibly imagine, at least within the max limits of our credit cards. 

So my new theory is that we should all pretend to live thirty years behind our technological means. Got a cell phone? Well, unless it is an emergency situation, stop using it as a computer, stop using it as a cell phone. Instead, use it as a phone thirty years ago: tie a string to it and tether it to the wall. Suddenly, you’ve got to sacrifice mobility for communication. You can’t talk on the go, you can’t text on the go. If you really want to talk to someone, you must talk to them in one spot. It makes you prioritize what’s important, walking or talking. 

If you want to send an email, go ahead, but pretend you only get to send five emails per day on account of your slow dial up connection. Want a chicken biscuit, go ahead and get one if you’re willing to drive forty miles because most small towns didn’t have a Chic-Fil-A back then? 

Sometimes it feels like technological progress makes tasks easier, but lives harder. Many so-called time-saving devices don’t really save time, but merely divide our attention–and it feels like my brain is a prime denominator that can’t be fractionalized anymore. I’m not ready to go full Amish yet, but thirty years back seems like a good starting point.