Coming Soon: DadWagon Presents: Loinfruit, Meltdowns, and Weeknight Drinking

If you follow us on Facebook, you may have noticed that we’ve been promoting “DadWagon Presents,” our new monthly reading series featuring some of New York’s most entertaining dads. But for some reason (probably sheer laziness), we’ve neglected to, you know, discuss it here on the site. Well, we’re lazy no longer! Here’s what’s up:

Every month starting at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 13, DadWagon Presents will bring three procreative writers to Pacific Standard (82 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-858-1951; pacificstandardbrooklyn.com) to tell parenting tales that may make you laugh, will probably make you cringe with self-recognition, and will almost definitely send you to the bar for another pint. So, leave the kids at home (please!) and come see our inaugural speakers:

Peter Meehan, author of the Momofuku and Frankies cookbooks, former NYT “$25 & Under” columnist, and founder (with David Chang) of Lucky Peach magazine. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and their daughter, Hazel.
Jeff Yang, “Tao Jones” columnist at the Wall Street Journal, regular contributor to WNYC and PRI’s “The Takeaway,” and author of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (volume 2 to be released this fall). He lives four blocks away in Park Slope with his wife, Heather, and their awesome sons, Hudson and Skyler.
Paul Ford, ftrain.com founder, former Harper’s Magazine editor, writer for New York, Slate, The Morning News, as well as the author of the novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star, and an all-around Internet-fame guru. He is lives in Ditmas Park (which he claims is much nicer than Park Slope) with his wife and twin babies.

Again, the details:

Where: Pacific Standard (82 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-858-1951; pacificstandardbrooklyn.com)
When:  Wednesday, June 13, at 7 p.m.
Cost: Free!

The Tantrum: Should Young Men Be Permitted to Breed?

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

As the elder statesmen of the DadWagon fathers (I’m 60), the first installment of this Tantrum fell to me. It’s a simple question, one that seems to be of increasing relevance to people like me (aka, people who think about not particularly important questions): is it okay to have children young?

Obviously not. Have you met men in the prime of their lives? (I’m actually 39—which is choice, not prime, at best.) Awful, stinky, deluded, arrogant, untrustworthy, incompetent, infantile mooks. Not only should they not be allowed to breed, it’s debatable whether or not they should be allowed to age.

More seriously, though, I’d like to consider the advantages of having a child while young (JP came when I was 33). Along with the fundamental matter of energy—going years without enough sleep is enough to age even a young man—there is the idea that youngsters are more open-minded and can handle the introduction of a squirming, screaming, pooping buzzkill more easily than their elders.

Perhaps. At least in my case, however, I don’t think I would have been mature enough to effectively navigate the upheavals that come with fatherhood while I was in my twenties. Not that I am such a self-effacing, putting-others-firster now, but I was definitely more selfish ten years ago—and selfishness does not a fine daddy make (or words to that effect).

Now, I will say this: there is something weird (to me) about the really old men (and by that I mean anyone older than my 39) having progeny, something that suggests a bulwarking of the self-esteem, a re-recognition of one’s virility, essentially, fatherhood as vanity project. This, I imagine, ain’t good. But at least when you’re older you are more likely to be able to pay someone to make up for your mistakes. So there’s that.

The iFather

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

We moved last month. Did I mention that? Perhaps not. This is the problem with blogging: I want to blog about things that matter to me, but if those things are as time-consuming and life-dredging as the global suck that is moving apartments, then suddenly I don’t have time to blog about it. Even when the move was over, and I did regain some time to write, I still felt spent and a bit too abused by the process to write about it. God forbid real adversity should ever hit this blog. I might not be able to get off the mat to overshare about it.

That said, moving had its advantages. A smaller apartment now means lower rent: who needs space when the kids mainly just wrap their arms around your legs all day anyway? Less moisture in the home: we moved from an apartment that was half in the basement and therefore jungle-dank, which isn’t that much fun even in a jungle. More light: we are now on the 21st floor, which means we are practically assaulted by the sun (haven’t bought curtains yet). Also, it means that we may not survive a loss of electricity, as we have become weird pod-people who must take an elevator whenever we step out of our door.

The biggest advantage, though, is the opportunity to de-clutter, specifically when it comes to electronics. Over the past six years and through two previous moves, I’ve been accumulating a mass of retro electronic parts. Not original-packaging-Atari-retro. Nothing that I can sell on eBay. Just things like a 12-foot IEEE 1284 Parallel Printer Cable from the days before USB ruled the earth. Or my first personal data assistant, a battered Handspring Visor (with stylus!) from the early aughts.

Now I’m losing the junk and detritus. Technology in general in simplifying: instead of having a cable box (and cable bill), we watch shows over the Internet. Instead of the Handspring Visor, my PDA is now my phone, which is also my camera. It’s the world as Steve Jobs (PBUH) wanted it.

Not that there isn’t a little bit of nostalgia for all those wires and clunky gadgets. You see, I am the I.T. guy of our little domestic corporation. And as any good I.T. guy knows, the secret to impressing your boss (in this case, my wife and occasionally my child) is to make your job look harder than it actually is. Those gadgets and wires, the cables that would fit into certain ports but not others: those all made even something basic like hooking a printer to a computer look baroque, complex. Trying something truly ambitious, like manually swapping out a graphics card on my PC, made me feel like I had just changed the transmission on a muscle car.

Alas, as with cars, which are now diagnosed through a process of one computer reading another, the physicality has all but vanished from being the I.T. guy. So I am changing my tactics. I am learning to exult in completing the automated setup dialogue. I can still hoard information to maintain my I.T. monopoly. That is, our television may now be light enough that my wife can pick it up, but I am still valuable because I alone have the passcodes that let the television communicate with its remote and with the internet and quite possibly (though I haven’t verified this) with the microwave and hair dryer. I volunteer to connect all of her gadgets for her, so that the process stays opaque. Consumer electronics are getting easier, more integrated, more compatible. But I am pretending, in front of my wife at least, that this is not so.

Behold the iFather: frailer, perhaps, than his forefathers, and with shamefully softer hands, but every bit as adept at conniving to defend his territory.

The Worst Parents in the World

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

 

Sasha and Matt enjoy the iPad in Rome, each with their drink of choice.

We saw them everywhere we went in Rome last month—at restaurants, on the bus and metro, in cafes. They looked like tourists, American most likely, youngish, with a toddler in tow. Totally normal. But, we’d notice, in the middle of meals, or squeezed into a crowded, slow mode of public transportation, they’d do the unforgivable. The kid would start to act up, and out would come—wait for it, wait for it—the iPhone. Sometimes the child would play simple games, Tozzle and the like, but often a video would come on, and the child would then sit entranced, immobile, ignoring the plate of specially prepared pasta al pomodoro while her parents would, in turn, ignore the child—and while all the sophisticated Italians in the area tried not to notice the little glass slate’s bleeps and burbles. And we, we resented them all—fatuous digital addicts in the birthplace of Western Civilization. How could they?

They were, of course, us, the Gross Family, simply trying to muddle through a two-week vacation in Italy with the least amount of distress. Our daughter, Sasha, is 3, with all the impulses and uncontrollability that go with that age. For the most part, she’s pretty good, pretty quiet, pretty well-behaved, but at a certain point in every meal or museum trip, she’s run out of steam, and though we’d do everything we could to calm her and engage her in the food or activity, there were limits. And so I’d bring out my iPhone and fire up “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (in Mandarin, for what it’s worth) or Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (keeping the volume way down, for what that’s worth), and then Jean and I would enjoy the rest of whatever in relative peace.

But the guilt! The incredible, unbearable guilt! We’d succumbed to the worst of all temptations, and had proved ourselves to be the lazy, irresponsible, uncreative American parents everyone stereotypically expects us to be. No verbal games for Sasha, no in-depth toddler-level conversations, no new flavors discovered. Instead, pulsing pixels and slackjawed amusement for Sasha, an extra glass of wine for Mommy and Daddy.

Actually, that’s not true at all. Actually, I felt no guilt whatsoever. Sure, I would’ve preferred Sasha to eat all her food or attempt to engage with us, her parents. But just because the iPhone (and its ilk) is the easily ridiculed emblem of our digital age doesn’t mean it’s essentially bad.

The thing is, we love to make fun of our addiction to new technology—almost as much, in fact, as we love to play with new gadgets. But their ease of use and startling breadth of features always somehow provoke a level of guilt. Our parents and grandparents didn’t have these things—they had books and banjos and candlelight and each other, and they did fine. We shouldn’t have to placate our kids with retina displays—we should make do with yesterday’s (or last century’s) tech, right?

It’s a romantic idea, and a stupid one. I mean, I’ve been using computers in a serious way for the last 28 years, and now, what, I should deny my kid the opportunity to get the same experience? There is no fighting the fact that devices like the iPhone, iPad and i-everything-else are going to be a fundamental part of our children’s lives (barring a zombie invasion or SkyNet takeover, of course), and those who would argue that there’s something inherently better about pre-digital entertainment are wasting your time, and their own.

I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t also try to promote things like actual books, wooden toys, or whatever. I’ll certainly squeal out loud with joy (if internally) the first time I see Sasha amuse herself with a tome of quality material at a restaurant meal. That’s what I used to do when bored, and my total immersion in novels does not strike me as all that different from Sasha’s immersion in Pocket God.

So, today I would like to call for a small but subtle change: From now on, let no one express surprise over the facility with which small children manipulate Apple products. From now on, let no one use “iPhone” or “iPad” as snide shorthand to dismiss children and their parents as tone-deaf solipsists or cultural philistines. From now on, let’s accept the place of gadgets in our lives and our children’s lives alongside the books and Matchbox cars and dolls and Legos and all the other crap we amuse ourselves with in order to forget for a too-brief moment the crushing boringness of life and the inevitability of our deaths—and theirs, and their children’s, too.

From now on, let us chill out about technology, and guiltlessly use it whenever the hell we want. And let us not use it, too. These things are all equivalent now.

Let me leave you with one final anecdotal observation on kids and technology. Late last year, as Sasha’s third birthday approached, Jean and I discussed what to get her. She’s always been interested in the photos we take of her with our iPhones, so we thought: How about a kid’s camera? We got her the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Something-Something, and when she opened it that December morning, Sasha was excited, running around the house and taking as many pictures as possible. Pretty neat.

But after that, she just didn’t use it much. If it happened to be lying around, she might pick it up and fire off a few shots, but it wasn’t the center of her life. And when we went off to Rome, it stayed home.

Which is not to say she didn’t bring a camera. No, she brought one—a tiny plastic toy camera, whose button cycles through images of various wild animals: a lion, an elephant, etc. It fits in her pocket, and it always seems to be nearby, and she’ll bring it up to her eye and squeal, “Say cheese!” as if she’s really taking a picture. She loves it, more than the digital one, I think. And that’s fine. When she’s ready to get serious about digital photography, the Fisher-Price one will still be around, and she can learn on that. Unless, by that time, she’s ready for her own iPhone.