2010: The Year in Pirate

And... we're back.

Like a lot of bloggifiers, I took a week off for holiday merriment.  And when I say "merriment," I mean heavy drinking.

I hope you had a good Christmakwanzukkha.  Our was fine.  I didn't do a lot of Yuletide posting this month, mainly because I just didn't have a lot to say about the season.  I'm not a huge Christmas fan anymore, so I mostly just kept my head down throughout the whole extravaganza.  I did, however, enjoy reading holiday posts on several of my favorite blogs, as well as great stuff by my compatriots at DadCentric and Culture Brats.

All good.  But I'm ready to put the holiday behind me.  In fact, I'm all set to put 2010 in my rear view mirror and hit the gas.  Not that nothing good happened.  This year had a fair share of crap baked into it, but there was some good stuff too.  The handy thing about maintaining a personal blog is that you can actually go back and see what you did throughout the year, see what you felt was worth documenting at the time, and reflect on the whole hot mess.

Of course, you have to make sure you look past your own creative spin when you do so. Most of the blogs I follow are written by great storytellers.  They embrace the part of blogging that we all love:  turning our messy lives into tidy chapters and essays.  We take our day-to-day-interactions and knead them into something with a narrative structure: there's a premise, rising suspense, a climax, all the good literary devices.  We try to find Funny in events that maybe weren't so amusing at the time.  Plus drama.  We bloggers love good drama.

And best of all, we get to place ourselves at the white-hot center of our little pocket universes.  Which means we get to portray ourselves any damn way we want: in some posts we're the Hero, in others we're the Victim, and every so often, we decide to be the Bad Guy.

And then sometimes we don't realize exactly how we do illustrate ourselves until we go back and read later.

When I read over past posts of mine, I seem to present myself in one of three ways:

1.  The Village Idiot

I know such a portrayal is not entirely accurate.  I don't live in a village.

In several of my posts from 2010, I illustrated myself as the dumbest guy in the room, despite the fact that I'm a teacher with one degree more than I need behind my name.  This is because I do feel that way a lot of the time in real life.  I frequently assume The Idiot Stance when I'm around other people, selling myself as your basic good-natured dumbfuck as a result.

People who know me (*sheepish wave at wife*) call me on it.  A friend of mine once said it was my default shtick:

"You do it all the time," he said.  "You expend a lot of energy in social situations claiming that you're a know-nothing moron.  It's like a pre-emptive defense mechanism."

"Duuurrrfff?" I replied at the time, looking up from my drool cup and trying to keep my dunce cap from toppling off.  We would've discussed it further, but I was distracted by my toes.

2.  The Cranky Old Man

When I go back and read some posts, I swear I sound like I'm 90-years-old.  I'm actually 40.  I don't know how this particular ethos surfaced.  Whether it's about dealing with "young people" today, or grousing about current music, there have been several posts where you'd think I wrote them while standing on my front porch in a bathrobe, black socks and slippers, grumbling at the world while shaking my fist in the air and clamping my teeth down to keep my yellow dentures from slipping out.

"Do you think I act older than I actually am?"  I asked Saucy recently.

"Not at all," she soothed while tucking my Snuggy around my legs and giving me my camomile tea and rheumatism medicine, "Now stopping fretting and tell me another story about the Depression."

3.  The Bad Cop

And then there are the posts about my daughter or my students where I tend to present myself as Terminator McBadass: a hardcore ass-kicker who wields his power with unholy, unstoppable fury.  I talk the BIG talk about making foes cower.  I say my day wasn't productive unless I made at least three students cry.  Is that portrayal even remotely true, you ask?

Yes.  Yes that one is actually completely and totally true.  I am a pirate, after all.  A ten-foot-tall, cyborg pirate enforcer with laser eyes.  So don't piss me off.  I will eat your babies.

I think I'm getting a little off-track.  Sorry.  All I really want to do here is link up to a few posts from the past year that highlight the big events that we on the Didactic Pirate Ship experienced over the last 12 months.  For example:

The time my daughter and I considered how social gender rules apply to Godzilla.

The time I had to fight The Walking Dead in my 8:00 am class.

The time I killed four elderly people with a single assignment deadline. 

The time I couldn't keep up with that goddamn twenty-year-old.

The time Mini-Pirate went from battling knights to crushing on them.

The time we all wondered why Saucy stays with me.

The time Mini-Pirate fell in love with the guy who made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

The time I was "the meanest Daddy of all the Daddies in the Land." 

The time I totally could've solved that dead animal problem on my own.

Not to mention the time Saucy and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary. Or the time we sold our house.  Or the whole Movember ordeal.

Turns out this year made for some pretty ok storytelling.  Good times, 2010.  Thanks for the memories.  Now get the hell off my lawn.

Scroogin' It Up for the Holidays

When I was seven, I only wanted one thing for Christmas:

A Millennium Falcon.  The one that would accommodate my fleet of action figures, with the working swivel cannons and retractable landing gear, and secret cargo hold for stashing contraband in the event one was boarded by Imperial guards.  It was the end all, be all of my existence at the time.  If it hadn't shown up under the tree, I'm sure that Christmas would've been ruined for me forever.  But Santa came through, despite the fact that I was certainly on the Naughty List that year.  Like most years.

My daughter never expresses the desire for any one big present for Christmas.  If you ask her what she wants, she never has an answer.  She just gets excited by the whole idea of gifts showing up on Christmas morning, as if by magic.  

And yet she hasn’t believed in Santa Claus for at least two years.

“Tell me the truth,” she says to me.  “You and Mommy are Santa, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.  “But if I were you, I'd keep your heretical beliefs to yourself.”

“Why?  And what’s helvetica beliefs?”

“If Santa finds out you don’t believe… I’m just saying.  He doesn’t give gifts to fickle, jaded children.”

Cue my daughter’s eye rolling.  “Fine,” she says in an exaggerated tone, “I totally believe in Santa.”  And then she leaves.

She’s a cynic.  That’s ok.  I am too.  In my post-Millennium Falcon years, I’ve really grown to dislike Christmas.  It’s a big, bombastic tribute to fanatical consumerism.  Plus, picking out presents for other people makes me tense.

It's not just Gift Stress that's made me dislike Christmas, though.  For the last few years, I've had a hard time evoking any shred of Christmas spirit.  Maybe it's just part of getting older, but all the sentiment that drenches the holidays just seems thin and forced to me.  In short, I've become pretty Grinchtastic this time of year.  I'm not proud of this, but there it is.

The good news is that even though I've felt this way about the holidays for a while, things always come together right at the last minute.  By the time we get to Defcon One Christmas Eve, I somehow find some holiday spirit that turns it around for me, enabling me to appreciate this time of year. 

It's December 23rd, and I'm not quite there yet.  But I have to admit that there are a few things that do help:

Living in a place where I can see this at dusk in December.

Having one of these in the house, making our living room smell like Colorado.

Being married to Saucy.

Ok, this isn't actually a picture of my wife.  But Saucy always (wrongly) thinks she looks horrible
in every picture I take of her, so we're going with a stand-in.
I've always thought Saucy and Scully looked a lot alike.

And this little badass plays a small role too.

So it's all good, really.  I fully expect the Christmas spirit to smack me between the eyes any minute.

Although a new Millennium Falcon with my name on it under the tree certainly wouldn't hurt.

*

Happy, happy holidays to you, stout-hearted crew members.  You are noble and good.  If the world was a cafeteria and there was a Cool Kids' Table, you'd all be sitting at it.  I'm grateful you let me hang out with you.

P.S.  My gift to you this year?  A couple of links:

1. The annual Gift Guide for Dads is up over at DadCentric.  Haven't bought the patriarch in your house the perfect present yet?  Shame on you.  Go now.  (Be warned that I went full on, balls-to-the-wall Geek for my personal picks.)

2. Culture Brats presents 100 hours of Chrismupchuckkhah: a Christmas song every half hour until the December 26th.  Some well-known, some really obscure.  All awesome.  And none of that Bing Crosby bullshit either.

Manly Man Vs. The Rotting Carcass

About six weeks ago, Saucy and I started to notice a smell in the house.  We had no idea what it was.

Saucy:  Seriously.  What is that?

Me: It smells like old diapers.

Saucy: It’s not diapers.

Me: I swear it smells exactly like when we used to have the Diaper Genie and it got full.

Saucy: Do you mean when I’d ask you to empty the Genie in the trash, and you’d say sure, and then I’d ask you three more times and a week later you’d get around to doing it once the house finally smelled like one giant used diaper?

Me:  That’s not relevant.  But yes, that’s what the smell is.

Saucy: We don’t have any diapers in the house.

Which was true.   Whatever the smell was, it was somewhere on the second story, and it was pervasive.  Total mystery.  I was convinced it was diaper-related, despite the fact that we haven’t bought a diaper for our daughter in seven years.  My main working theories ranged from an old wadded-up diaper hidden somewhere by the previous tenants, to the spirit of a unearthly demon baby who used phantom stinky smells to drive out residents. 

I presented all my theories to Saucy who considered them thoughtfully for .856 seconds before rejecting them.  Then she presented an alternative idea which was infinitely more plausible:

Dead animal.

Which was the obvious answer.  A couple weeks earlier, we’d actually heard a noise in the middle of the night that we now realized was some sort of critter who’d possibly fallen or sprung some old trap while foraging within the walls, and was now dead and rotting.

Well.  Merry Damn Christmas.  No wonder I haven’t been in the holiday spirit this season.  I’ve been living in a pungent haze of decomposing carcass.

Once we realized what the deal was, we felt foolish that it took us so long to figure it out.  But I saw it as a problem that I could absolutely handle.  I’ve had plenty of experience dealing with pests.  We’re no strangers to invading rodents; our previous house was perched on the lip of a canyon, so we got our fair share of mice and rats sneaking in.  When we’d see something furry dart under a cabinet, Saucy would suddenly go all Girl (complete with a dainty “Eek!”), and I would step up and Deal With The Situation.

Which, of course, made me feel all awesome and stuff, with an extra helping of Y Chromosome.

This isn't me.  This is a picture of UFC fighter Forrest Griffin.
But this is exactly what I looked like when I killed mice in our old house.

 My method for removing mice had two steps:  First, I’d lay a strategically placed sticky trap to catch and immobilize the creature.  Then, once I had little guy stuck and scrabbling, I employed a swift downward motion with my Complete Works of Chaucer (the heaviest book I own).  I’m not saying it was the most humane.  But it was quick.  It’s a really big book.  I wielded it like a gladiator.  I was the Manly Man who struck vermin down with unholy fury.

So, when Saucy and I realized we had a dead something in our walls, I assumed I’d just be awesome and handle it.  Whatever was in there was already dead, so I wouldn’t even need my Chaucer.  I just needed to extract the thing.  And to make things even easier, Saucy discovered that we could access the inner wall space in question by removing some drawers from a built-in hall closet.  With a little luck, the corpse would be within arm’s reach!  I could just grab a broom and a garbage bag, bang around a bit, and voila! No more smelly carcass!  And after saving the day, I’d still get to wear my Man Crown for the rest of the day.  And wave my Man Sceptre around proudly while booming, “OVER ALL THIS, I RULE.”

But Saucy said no.  No, I could not get it myself.

Me:  But it might be totally easy.

Saucy: You’re not digging around between the walls.  Dead rat means old feces.  Not healthy.  You could breathe in stuff.

Me: I’ll hold my breath.

Saucy: There could be contaminants.

Me: But I’m Superman.

Saucy: You could get hantavirus.

Me: Santa’s virus?

Saucy: Hantavirus.

Me:  What’s that?

Saucy:  Seriously?

Well, excuse me for not knowing what exactly Fanta virus was.  So I Googled it.  The first thing I learned is that Hantavirus is in fact one word.  Beyond that, I learned that it’s a gnarly airborn virus that you can from breathing in particles from rat and mouse corpses and feces and stuff.  You can presumably also get it by rubbing a rodent on your face, or possibly French kissing one.  Symptoms include dry coughing, vomiting, fever, headache, and malaise.  (Seriously.  Malaise is on the list.  Which makes me wonder if maybe I’ve had the fucking hantavirus for the last decade of my life.  But I digress.)

Oh, and on WebMD, it also says that possible complications from hantavirus include cardio-respiratory failure, kidney failure, and death.

Death?  Gulp.

All that to say… me being the Big Save-the-Cheerleader-Save-the-World Man was probably not going to happen in this case.  Saucy admonished me to call an expert.

Hmph.

Dolefully, I called a pest control company which sends its own Manly Men to deal with such matters.  The guy on the phone, Eric, said he’d come over the next day to assess the situation.  Over the phone, he explained that he’d probably have to drill a hole in the wall, use a special snaky camera to spot the animal, and wear a hazmat suit for extraction.   It sounded both high-tech, and dangerous.

I asked if he might bring an extra hazmat suit for me to wear, in case he needed back-up.  He said no.

He came over on Saturday.  I was all ready to provide assistance for the extraction, in case he was overcome by the smell, or he broke a limb trying to reach back into the recesses of the house to get the rat corpse.  Or if the corpse wasn’t a rat at all, but something larger.  Like… a BOBCAT!  A bobcat that wasn’t completely dead yet, and when Eric reached in to grab it, it would clamp its steel jaws around his arm and rip it off.  Eric would definitely need help then.  This was about to become very exciting.

Eric:  Hi, I’m Eric from Pest Control.

Me:  Eric!  Welcome!  Glad you’re here!  This could be a tricky case.

Eric:  It sounded pretty simple over the phone.  You have a dead rat in the walls, right?

Me:  I may have underestimated the situation.  It might be a bobcat.

Eric: O… kay.  Show me.

Me: I did some recon earlier.  It looks like a real situation.

Eric: Probably not.

Me:  I have rubber gloves.  See?

Eric: That won’t be necessary.

I led Eric upstairs, and I pulled out the drawers out of our built-in closet that revealed an open space between the back walls.  Eric shined his flashlight and…..

…THERE IT WAS.

Cute, furry carrier of global plague death.

A small, brown and white rat that had gotten caught in a long-forgotten trap left by the previous tenants.  Right there, easily within arm’s reach.

Me (grabbing Eric’s arm and yanking him back to safety):  Careful.  There’s hantavirus.

Eric: I think we’re safe.  But you can take a couple steps back, if you’re worried.

Me:  Should we be wearing surgical masks?

Eric: Sir, please back up.

I watched from ten feet back as Eric whipped out a garbage bag, reached in, and swept the rat out, dropping it neatly in the bag.

Me: FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAN, BE CAREFUL.

Eric:  Done.

Me:  That’s…. what?  You’re done?

Eric: That’ll be 200 bucks.

After Eric left, I went into my wife’s office to let her know that Eric and I had “handled the situation.”

Saucy: Is the rat gone?

Me: Damn right it’s gone.  Eric and I took care of it.

Saucy: What did he say about the smell? 

Me: He said we’ll be able to tell a big difference in less than an hour.

Saucy:  Good.  Glad that’s done.

Me:  It was pretty touch-and-go there for a bit.  But we got the job done.

Saucy: “You” did, eh?

Me:  No need to thank us.

Saucy: Ok, then.

Me:  It’s a good thing you didn’t watch.  You probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

Saucy: I bet.

Me:  I totally could’ve done it myself, by the way.

Saucy:  No.

Me: I’m not afraid of Fanta virus.

Saucy:  I know.  You’re manly.

Me:  THAT’S RIGHT.

We're back to Defcon 5.  Situation: Stable.  I’ll be wearing my Man Crown for the rest of the week, waving my Man Sceptre around to see if anyone notices.

**

P.S. In an rare act of Cosmic Blog Alignment, Kristine over at Wait in the Van has a mouse story of her own to tell.  No lives were lost.  You can read it here.

From my Inbox: One student's crusade against my cell phone policy

Dear Professor T------,

I am writing this email to you in the hopes that you will not be offended, but I feel the need to express my unhappiness about one of your class policies after certain things happened in class today (I think you know what I am referring to).  I am talking about your policy regarding cell phones in class.  I understand that you do not like students to use them (you say it all the time!) but I find your policy to be WAY harsh and I am not just saying this because you yelled at me today for using mine.  The fact is, I did not intend to use my phone during class but I received a very important text from my boyfriend about a personal matter that I needed to respond to right away because he and I going through a hard time right now.  You need to understand that sometimes things happen and we have to respond because that is life.  I know that rules are rules but I think you were very disrespectful of me when you spoke to me the way you did in front of the entire class in the way that you did.  Before today you were of my favorite teachers here but after your this I am sorry but I will have to rethink that belief.

I hope you will reconsider your cell phone policy for other students who deserve to be respected and not ridiculed as you did with me today.  We are paying a lot of money to go here and teachers like you do not make it easier.

Very Sincerely,

Brittany R--------

***

Dear Brittany,

Thanks for your email.  Like all teachers, I'm always eager to receive feedback from students, whether their suggestions are about my curriculum, classroom policies or fashion choices.  On behalf of teachers everywhere, I salute your directness and honesty.

You should know that my cell phone policy has gone through several adjustments over the past several years, based on my experience with students.  You know, at first I didn't even have a policy about phones in my classes.  Can you believe that?  The idea that a student would allow his/her phone to ring during a class session, let alone use said phone, was unthinkable!  And inconceivable!  Surely, I thought, any decent person with a modicum of awareness of his/her surroundings knows better than to allow such a blatant disruption!  We live in a civilized nation, do we not?

That was before I had a student allow her Kanye West ring tone to go off at full volume in the middle of a class.  I was leading a discussion about the use of logical fallacies in famous political speeches.  The ring tone was West's tour de force collaboration with Daft Punk entitled Stronger ("You know how long I been on ya/Since Prince was on Appollonia/Since OJ had Isotoners/Don't say that I never told ya").  Such an awesome song, right?

However: while the song is a true new millenium classic by a humble musical icon, it didn't contribute to our discourse that day.  I was shocked that the student allowed her phone to go off.  I was even more shocked when she answered the phone and proceeded to have a conversation with the caller about where they should go for lunch later.  Right there in the middle of class.  While I waited.  With the vein in my forehead starting to throb in anger.  

So the next semester, I added a cell phone policy to my syllabi.  

At first, my policy was a gentle one.  It read: "Please avoid letting cell phones go off in class, to minimize disruption."  Very non-confrontational, I felt.  I mean, I said please and everything.

But then I started noticing that my students were looking down into their laps frequently during class.  At first I just thought those students were just oddly curious about their post-adolescent development, gazing down at themselves in wonder.  After all, most Freshmen are in their late teens, possibly still learning about their bodies.  Sure, it's inappropriate to stare intently into one's own groin in a classroom, but better than staring into the groin of one's neighbor, am I right?

And I realized that those same students who were staring downwards also seemed to be experiencing a strange neon glow originating from their laps and illuminating their faces.  It concerned me: were they experiencing some sort of rapture?  Were they actually aliens preparing to shed their human flesh shells and emerge as brilliantly lit, amorphous creatures like in the classic mid-80s film Cocoon?

I later discovered that, while students were technically adhering to my policy by not allowing their phones to make noise, they were instead texting, albeit silently, under their desks.  And weren't smart enough to turn the brightness of their screen displays down.


I don't mind telling you that was a difficult day for me, Brittany.

Shocked, I was.  Absolutely shocked and appalled that students would find such a devious way to use their phones in class.  Because you see, fair Brittany, the real point here is that, when you're in class, you really should be focusing on that class' agenda, rather than texting friends about where to do for lunch, or what color nail polish will be appropriate for the party next weekend, or whether or not Josh was lying when he said never hooked up with Ashley during Winter Break, which is such a lie because everyone knows Ashley is such a total slut.

So I revised my policy again.  It read: "Please do not allow your cell phone to disrupt class proceedings.  Doing so is disrespectful to both the teacher, and your fellow students."

I felt this was direct.  And polite.  Hell, I kept please in there.

It didn't work.  Students insisted on peeking at their phones in their backpacks.  They kept trying to text.  And every once in a while, their phones would sound off in the middle of class.  When that happened, I would halt the proceedings, search for the student with the guilty look on his/her face, present my Expression of Extreme Disapproval and wait for them to quail, feel appropriately chagrined, turn their phone off, and return their attention to the class session.  It usually worked.

But I still felt the need to revise my policy once more.  My subsequent statement about cell phones is the one currently articulated in your course syllabus, which I reiterated to everyone on the first day of the semester:  "Please turn off all cell phones before entering this room.  Leave them off until class is done.  Do not check your phone during class.  Do not text during class.  Do not look at your phone during class.  Consider this fair warning; violating this policy will have an immediate impact on your in-class participation grade."

I do not know how to be clearer than this, Brittany.  And you'll note that I still say goddamn please. 

I'm sorry you feel I showed you some disrespect today when I asked you to put your phone away.  From my perspective, I was quite polite.  I asked if you were texting.  You look up from the bright, otherwordly purplish glow of your phone and said, "No."  I said, "Brittany, I'm certain that you are.  Rather than lie about it, just put the damn phone away."  You revealed that you did in fact have a phone in your lap, which you turned off.  You exhaled audibly through your nose, and mumbled something I couldn't quite make out.  An abject apology, surely.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used profane language when I addressed you.  But I didn't think the word "damn" was inappropriate, considering how often I hear you walk into class while in the middle of a phone conversation, littering your own side of the dialogue with language that would make a sailor call home and apologize to his mother.  You often seem to be speaking to a romantic partner on your phone when you arrive.  Earlier this week, your final sign-off before hanging up was:  "Oh yea?  Well Fuck you, Shane. Fuck you with a fucking nine-foot pole.  I hope your dick shrivels up and falls off."

Perhaps the "personal matter" you were texting about in class today had something to do with Shane's medical problem.  If his dick had in fact shriveled up and fallen off, and he needed you to take him to see a doctor, I must admit that would qualify as both a personal matter, and an emergency situation that couldn't wait.

For now, I will be keeping my cell phone policy as is, even though it will knock me off your Favorite Teacher list.  But again, I thank you for your constructive advice.  I do hope you won't hesitate to suggest other ways that my class could be improved.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Please give Shane my best wishes for a full recovery.

Sincerely, 

T-----------

P.S.  You might be interested to know that other teachers actually have far more stringent rules about cell phones than I.  Check out this video.  I'm pretty sure it's faked, but it could inspire me change my policy again someday.

Cruelty, Thy Name Is Woman

First:  Man alive, did it feel good to shave this week.  Thanks again to all of you who donated for Movember.  I thank you, my now-smooth-as-a-baby's-butt upper lip thanks you, prostates across the land thank you.(Ew.)


Moving on: we have a situation with the Mini-Pirate.  One that is normal, expected, but one that looks to be very dramatic.  And moving.  And blogworthy.

A boy in Mini-P's class has a crush on her.

His name is Ryan.  He's this nice, sweet-faced kid with a Batman backpack who's always sort of hanging around Mini-P at the start and end of each day.  Saucy sees him at the morning drop-off, and I see him in the afternoons when all the kids are spilling out of their classrooms at the end of the day.  The interaction I witness between Ryan and Mini-P usually goes like this:

Ryan: Bye!
Mini-P:

Ryan: I have a new Pokemon card!
Mini-P: Ok.

Ryan: If you want, I'll bring it tomorrow so you can see it!
Mini-P:  Ok.

Ryan: Ok, then.  See you tomorrow, ok?  Bye!

I know.  It's Casablanca.  It's an Affair to Remember.  They're Harry and Sally.  The same romantic story since time began.  The seeds of romance blossom in the wild garden of the heart, am I right?

This is a sweet kid.  He goes out of his way to talk to my daughter, and share some bon mot or interesting fact about ninjas.  On her side of the romance, the Mini-Pirate seems to be playing it cool.  She'll talk to him, draw the occasional superhero comic book scene alongside him during free time.  Details beyond that are a bit hazy -- Mini-P's recess time is mainly spent playing tether ball, where she smashes her way through opponents like it's Thunderdome.  But since Ryan doesn't play tetherball (he's more the shy, artistic type), they don't really hang out during those times.  He does hover nearby, though -- just a few feet outside the range of the swinging tetherball (known as Mini-P's Zone of Terror).

I asked Mini-P what she thinks of Ryan (totally casually), and she revealed nothing beyond what I already know: 1) He's in her class.  2) He likes superheroes.  3) He doesn't play tetherball.  4) One time in class he picked his nose and pulled something big out.

Obviously, she doesn't recognize that the kid, who is always lingering a few feet away from her, is smitten.  In fact, I didn't really notice what was happening myself -- Saucy was the one to point it out to me.  She also pointed out that Mini-P is playing the whole situation cool.  Basically, she has this kid eating out of her hand.

I'm a little worried about Ryan.  This may be just the beginning for him, the first of a string of memories: about girls who held his heart in their hands, girls who ignored him, or laughed at him.  In a couple decades, he'll have his own Cee-Lo video running on endless replay in his head.

I want to pull himaside and tell him not to try so hard with the Mini-Pirate.  Or at least, to not get too hung up on her.  Maybe I could clap a hand on his shoulder and explain about girls, and how they do what they do.  You know.  Just the whole thing where they see how much you like them and they keep you at arm's length while they wait to get noticed by the asshole with the motorcycle who sits in the back of class drawing tattoos on his own arm with a Sharpie.  I want to tell Ryan to hang in there.  Nice guys get theirs later, after girls grow up.

*  *  *

The thing is, I remember being Ryan in fourth grade.  My backpack had Scooby Doo on it instead of Batman, but still.

I had a huge crush on Amy Smithson, which was unrequited.  Our parents were friends, so I'd see her at our neighborhood pool every summer, and we were in the same class for the first few years of elementary school.  And I secretly loved her.

Fourth grade was the year I decided to tell her.  She and I were both in Mrs. Barry's class, and I chose my Romeo-Juliet-balcony moment carefully.  I didn't push her into hedges or pull her hair the way we're told boys do when they're expressing affection.  I decided to show my love to her in Math.

I used poetry.  I used the power of words.  I chose those words carefully, composing just the right poem that would paint the portrait of my devotion for her.   Once I new what I wanted to say, I inked the message right into the palm of my left hand with a magic marker.  Then, when Mrs. Barry was busy writing a division problem on the blackboard, I waved at Amy to get her attention, and flashed my hand at her, giving her time to read my sonnet:

I like you do you like me?

She had to look carefully to see my hand from two desks away.  But after squinting and reading, one of her eyebrows rose and she gave me a look that clearly said: "Are you fuckin' kidding me with this?  I'm so totally going with Robert Tomaso, and everybody knows it."

Yes.  The look said all that.  I was crushed.  I felt my heart crumple like a cheap soda can.  I slumped in my seat, heartbroken.

And then, after taking a minute to regroup, I dealt with the pain the only way a lovestruck lad can: I embraced it.  With my magic marker, I wrote a second message on my other palm.  And when Mrs. Barry had her back turned again, I got Amy's attention once more and flashed the hand.  This time I used bigger letters, so Amy could clearly see:

AMY S. SUCKS

Amy's eyes grew wide.  I felt instantly vindicated.  She clearly saw the hurt pushing through my eloquent words.  I assumed she would recognize that my cruelty was really just the result of my heartbreak; she would see this, become smitten by my passion for her, and use her own palm and magic marker to tell me that not only did she love me back, but she'd only been using Robert Tomaso to make me jealous.  And after school, we could go find a carnival somewhere nearby, just like the end of Grease (which everyone at my school had seen except me) and I'd win her a teddy bear, and we would be known from then on as America's favorite couple.

That's not what happened.

Instead of pledging her secret love back to me, Amy raised her hand.

"Mrs. Barry!" she called out.  "Seth wrote a bad word about me on his hands!"

My entire body went cold.  My heart plunged into a bucket of ice water, and I'm sure I turned pale out of total embarrassment.  Mrs. Barry walked over to me.  Everyone was looking.  Seriously.  I'd already been in trouble a lot that year: for daydreaming, for whispering, for tipping back in my chair.  In other words, Mrs. Barry already hated me.  She told me to hold out my hands.

I did. She looked down at both of my messages.  I went from cold to burning hot. Face flushing at incendiary levels.  Mortified.  I don't remember what Amy was doing while I was getting in trouble, but in my mind, I picture her sitting primly, waiting for Mrs. Barry to haul me up, grip my wrists, and turn my hands towards the rest of the class, so they could see me in all my lovesick vulnerability.   Magic marker tattoos to prove it.

She didn't do that.  She made me stay after school, and gave me a stern lecture then -- about wasting class time, and about writing profanity ("Sucks."  At the time, very profane.) on myself.  And she said she was going to call my parents and tell them what I had done.

I remember walking home slowly that afternoon, scuffing my shoes on the sidewalk, my face still burning with shame.  And anger.  And love, still.  Because I still loved Amy Smithson, with her brown hair that curled up at the ends, and her blue eyes and the faintest spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose and her striped knee socks.  And this whole thing could've been just a big wacky misunderstanding between two lovers, like in The Philadelphia Story.

My parents weren't home when I arrived.  At the time, my dad worked during the day and my mom was taking college classes in the afternoons.  So I sat alone in the house for a little while, dreading their arrival.  It didn't occur to me that Mrs. Barry's threat had been completely empty.

I decided to do something about my pain.  I picked up the phone, and called Amy.  She answered, and I said, "You got me in so much trouble today."

I thought she might show remorse.  Maybe she'd even take this private moment to finally confess that she'd only narced on me today to protect her own feelings.  She loved me with the same fervent fourth-grade devotion that fueled my passion for her.  She would tell me this, and we were agree to be boyfriendandgirlfriend.

She didn't say any of that.  Instead, she hung up on me without a word.

*  *  *

Dear Mini-Pirate,
I don't know how much you like young Ryan.  He seems like a sweet kid who really likes you, probably just as a friend.  There's no issue here, for now -- but next year, or the year after, if Ryan decides that he likes likes you, more than a friend, more than a fellow devotee of superhero comic books, if he ever opens himself up to you by pledging his love for you on his hand, showing you affection in a way that most boys in grade school never do... be kind to him.  Let him down easy.

But do let him down.  I'm not having some little snot-nosed punk sniffing around my daughter.



P.S.  Speaking of Cee-Lo.  This is my new favorite earworm.  Saucy doesn't get it.