I went to the usually very funny and faux-informative Adult Ed lecture series last night (in the bar that sort of banned strollers OMG). A couple of my friends were reading from their war books about murder and manhunts. They were good but not very funny at all, but the final presenter was Ken Freedman, station manager at the really quite awesome WFMU. He brought out a series of the kind of arcane recordings that has few people listening but everyone liking his station.
The best song: An Open Letter to My Teenage Son (1967) by a very different type of radio DJ, Victor Lundberg. It’s a stentorian warning to a son who wants to know whether it’s right to burn his Vietnam draft card.
The best lines:
“I would remind you that your mother will love you no matter what you do. Because she is a woman.”
“If you decide to burn your draft card, then burn your birth certificate at the same time. Because from that moment, I have no son.”
Ouch.
This was actually a top ten single, sold a million records and won a Grammy. Freedman also tracked down a couple songs that were released in response to Lundberg: one from the Southie-voiced Robert Tamlin is on WFMU’s blog here.
In the meantime, rest assures that my children will be hearing this a lot over the next 40 or so years: “Your mother will love you no matter what you do. Because she is a woman.”
So, perhaps our loyal DadWagon readers thought that now, with the NYC school year underway, that the Universal Pre-K bitching was finally at end, one way or another. Please, I would hope you folks know us better than that by now. We simply do not stop complaining here at DadWagon. We like to complain. We live to complain.
JP was officially rejected by his local public school in both rounds of lottery applications. I’m trying not to feel too bad. According to the New York Daily News, his school received 499 applications for just 36 spots. Combine those odds with the fact the lottery system is weighted towards children with siblings already in the school, and JP’s chances of getting in were basically non-existent.
To protect ourselves we enrolled JP in a local private preschool, which costs about $14,000 per year for four full days a week. We had to put down $1000 as a non-refundable deposit, along with another $3000 payment due yesterday, the first day of school. The only problem is that we are still on the waiting list at the public school. If not enough kids who were accepted at the public school register (their family moved, they decided to go to private school), then JP could conceivably still get in. What this meant was we showed up for the first day minus our check, and the good folks at the school were so kind as not to ask for it.
Then this morning another, closer, cheaper private pre-school where JP was on a wait list called and asked if were still interested in a spot. Presumably we will have to give them some non-refundable deposit money, which we are likely to do, given the location and the fact that it’s five days a week instead of four. Of course, we could lose this money, too, if the public school calls us and offers JP a spot. For those of you counting at home, that’s a potential couple thousand dollar loss at two schools that JP might never attend.
Really, though, does it even need to be said? Do not allow people to hook your son up to a car battery and shock him until he turns straight.
Actor Glenn Shadix–whom I remembered as Seinfeld’s landlord and the intensely swish interior designer from Beetle Juice–died yesterday in Alabama. He was young, just 58, but old enough that when he had come out to his father in 1970, his dad told him straighten up or he wouldn’t be allowed to see his younger brothers and sisters. So he voluntarily signed up for electroshock aversion therapy, at the age of 17.
This did not end well. After the therapy, Shadix tried to kill himself using his (very moral) parents’ supply of uppers. He almost didn’t survive coming out.
They don’t use electroshock so much anymore for ex-gay therapy, but there’s no shortage of mentally and emotionally abusive programs out there dedicated to the proposition that you can “pray away the gay”. And gay teens are still killing themselves all over the country, just like Shadix tried to do.
My old Stranger colleague Sean Nelson pointed out this video of Shadix talking about his experience. The sound quality is lousy, but it’s worth a watch. It’s a quiet testimony, but an important one.
In his column for the Calgary Herald, Klaszus wrote about dads who get angry at their children. I was, naturally, the lead example in his column: now all of Alberta knows that I wanted to kill my pre-lingual lovemuffin because he was screaming in the tub a week ago.
I’m happy enough being the poster child for paternal anger, though, because as Klaszus rightly points out, anger and frustration are pretty common emotions that have nevertheless been edited out of our collective story about having and raising kids.
He argues that it’s not that different from postpartum depression. Those who’ve never experienced it wonder how you can feel that way about your own children. Those who have been through it just don’t talk about it afterwards.
Klaszus also links this Omertà to those rare instances where parents actually do beat their kids, sometimes to death. It’s the worst kind of crime, of course, but it does have roots in the same daily vexations that Klaszus and I share. I don’t presume to understand all the awful mysteries of infanticide, but I would bet that parents who kill their children are not contract killers. They are assholes and bullies perhaps, but not professional assassins. There’s rarely a plan. And not all of them are mentally ill. Sometimes they are just people who start getting angry and don’t stop for whatever reason.
But there’s nothing particularly unique to Canada about all that. What did seem as foreign as a looney to me in Klaszus’ column was this exchange:
I appreciated Thornburgh’s honesty because the previous morning, I’d been ready to angrily throw my own 18-month-old daughter out the back door. She’d been shrieking impatiently as I made her oatmeal. Eventually I snapped, repeatedly and loudly shouting “BE QUIET!” until my wife came downstairs to intervene.
“What’s going on?”
“She’s losing it,” I said, accusing the wee one.
“And you respond with a tantrum of your own? Go upstairs and take a few minutes.”
Is that true, Canadian readers? Up north, can a wife really just give her husband a time-out like that? That’s bad news for me, because I hate time-outs almost as much as my kids do. And yet I was thinking of moving to Canada when Sarah Palin is elected president in 2012. What to do?
I went to the usually very funny and faux-informative Adult Ed lecture series last night (in the bar that sort of banned strollers OMG). A couple of my friends were reading from their war books about murder and manhunts. They were good but not very funny at all, but the final presenter was Ken Freedman, station manager at the really quite awesome WFMU. He brought out a series of the kind of arcane recordings that has few people listening but everyone liking his station.
