Best to bring protection. Those scouts don’t take “no” for an answer.

2. I was supposed to be using my leave to work on my dissertation, which I had on the back-burner during the fall and hoped to make some progress on during the winter. Now I’m doing that while also TA’ing. This is stupid because…

3. What I really should have been doing during this quarter, while on leave, was work on a course I’m teaching in the spring. Now I’m doing that while also writing a dissertation and grading papers/holding sections for undergrads.

4. I’ve been playing Hanging With Friends and Words With Friends. You should play me. I’m mediocre at it. My username is BackpackingDad.

5. I’ve been making Art. I’m an excellent drawer. I draw pictures and post them on my Google+ page. They often look like this one I did about the ESPN headline about NBA star Jeremy Lin:

6. I’ve been playing Mega Man 2.

7. I’ve been parenting. Sort of.

8. I’ve been husbanding. Sort of.

9. I’ve been pet-owning. Sort of.

10. I’ve been making lists.

Now, to be clear for a minute: We are not fancy ball-attenders. But this year has seen a bit more of the “Sure, why not?” attitude pervading our doings than previous years, so when Emily received a Gilt City coupon for tickets to this thing and asked me if I wanted to go, I replied “YES!”

Grandma was persuaded to watch the kids for the night so we could overnight in San Francisco and make a Valentine’s weekend out of it. Emily got her hair and makeup did. And I? I rented a tuxedo.

I want to wear a tuxedo every day now.

Since it was a masquerade, we also bought some masks at Cost Plus. Mine was a little small for my face, but did the trick.

We ate Venetian-style food (cheese? chicken skewers? some kind of thick bread that was a little pizza-ish) and drank Venetian-themed drinks and danced among the art while Masque of the Red Death was projected on the wall above us.

We looked at paintings by Venetian masters, noting how easy it was to pick out Jesus, and how the standards of feminine and masculine beauty have changed over the years (then: small boobs, big hips; small wangs, no abs. Now…different.)

We aren’t great at art. Mostly we went in order to wear fancy clothes. And also so that Emily could steal this lamp.

(Emily did not actually steal the lamp.)

Note that some people took “formal attire” or “evening wear” a little more casually than others. For Emily, it meant “ball gown”. For the woman behind Emily in that picture it meant “underwear”. For one dickwad, it meant “jeans”. He’d better be rich.

We talked to some people about technology and philosophy and performance art (I asked her what the appropriate way to interact with the hired contortionists was; she replied that they didn’t care, that for something like this they were just putting in the time, so go ahead and stare or not stare, smile or not smile, whatever), then cut to the dance floor where we ended the night.

I used the Uber app to get a car to our hotel so I didn’t have to wait around for a cab like one of the common folk. (I think it’s funny to refer to anyone wearing formal attire as “common folk”, but seriously, if you don’t have your act together to use technology to your advantage you’re a techno-peasant), and we cracked wise with the driver all the way to the hotel.

All of this brought to us by a coupon and a “Sure, why not?” attitude about the world. And a grandma willing to overnight with the kids.

Now, who has an event coming up I can wear a tux to?

(Photos without a lamp taken by Toni Bird.)

For while Erin was reaching the apex of her swing, she was yelling, “Daddy, daddy, look how high I got! Without whining!”

The last time she was at the park she grumbled and whined the whole time she was on the swings, refusing to do the work required to pump herself as high as she wanted to go, demanding that I push her. If I have a button, it’s the whiny-demand button, so I told her we would be leaving if she couldn’t have fun at the park. More whining later, we left.

That lesson seems to have sunk in.

Return to the picture now. Do you see Adrian standing there? Well I certainly didn’t. As I was reaching for my camera, he was on the neighbouring swing. As I was aiming the camera, he was on the neighbouring swing. As I was taking the picture, he was off the swing.

And as I was lowering the camera, he was stepping in front of his sister’s swing.

Just after this picture was taken, Adrian was flattened. (He’s fine now. And perhaps a little wiser about walking in front of swings.)

So sure, a picture tells a thousand words. But today, everything interesting going on happened on the edges of the picture.

The stand-up was good, but underappreciated by Harmon who, “blind drunk” (as he repeatedly described himself), kept up a running show of genuine or exaggerated pique at being kept waiting in the wings for three hours with nothing to do but drink. (He arrived two hours before showtime, at a Nerdist staffer’s request, he said.) He was funny, and we laughed along with him quite a lot as he aped doing stand-up bits, starting with premises like going to the post office, but returning again and again to a “this is how white people do this….this is how black people do this” joke about jokes. Delivered sober, I’d have appreciated this, but delivered drunk it didn’t work the eighth time in a row Harmon brought it out. He couldn’t keep it good-natured enough, allowing cynicism to lead him around by the nose. Chris Hardwick, sober for nine years now, tried to keep the interview moving along, but I couldn’t help wondering if he saw his former alcoholic self a little in Harmon’s spiraling performance. No doubt he wanted to keep everything light, so he never really tried to reign his guest in, but this meant Harmon ran roughshod over the panel. As I said, he was funny, so it wasn’t a waste of anyone’s time, but I’m sure it wasn’t how anyone had expected the interview with Very Special Guest Dan Harmon was going to go.

It wasn’t all Harmon being his own Drunk Hulk, though, since of course he was able to answer some questions about the business of writing pilots, putting on a show, why he would never go back to writing features (because in TV the writer is the king, while in features the writer is a cog), and about Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who parody that appears on Community on occasion and who has become a nerd icon in his own right. But while fielding questions about Community, Harmon’s inebriated honesty may have gotten the better of him: He seemed overwhelmingly cynical about the future of the show.

Is Community going to be cancelled?

Nobody asked that question. And Harmon never said anything specific. But his attitude about the likelihood of doing such-and-such with Abed, or casting Chris Hardwick as a regenerated Inspector Spacetime, was very negative, as though he had already written off Community’s future.

Admittedly, the conversation was loose and rambling. His addled brain may have been seeing the world much more darkly than realistically, and so that may have been infecting his attitude as he spoke about the show. Or, he may have been more honest about the show’s future than he would have been had he gone on stage completely sober.

Dan Harmon was embarrassed by what went on, and on Sunday morning he apologized to Chris, Matt, Jonah, San Francisco, America, Comedy and Erin McGathy.

I don’t want to give the impression that Dan Harmon spoiled the show in any way. In fact, I think much of the crowd enjoyed bearing witness to it. I know I laughed a lot, even if it was with increasing discomfort every time he pulled out his “white people/black people” meta-joke. I want Community to be on the air for years, but I’m afraid that I what I saw on Saturday night was a show creator already in mourning.

Hmm. I wonder where Adrian got to. It’s awfully quiet.

Oh, there you are. Say, watcha got there?

You. Yes you. Hey. You.

You’re so busted.

His defense? “But I, but I , but I wanted to eat ice cream!”

Sneaky, but honest. His sister would have blamed it on the fridge somehow.

(Yes, of course I grabbed my camera, immediately. Blog fodder like this doesn’t come along every day, you know.)

“No touching the salad dressing bottles.”

“No touching the pickle jars.”

“No squishing the bread.”

“No poking holes in the plastic wrapping on the chops.”

“No running down the aisles.”

“No eating apples straight from the bin.”

“No eating chicken straight from the bin.”

Because with two kids, and at a store other than Costco with its giant shopping carts, there is only room for one in the cart itself. The older child must be entrusted to walk alongside.

(Or, in Erin’s case, to hang off the side, the front, climb underneath, skip behind, and occasionally get run over a bit when she’s not paying attention.)

Not pictured: Adrian. Erin used to be a champion cart sitter, though.

I grabbed a cart from the cart area and walked it back to the car. I loaded Adrian in the seat and then I saw it. Every parent’s nightmare.

There was no seat belt in the shopping cart!

Now, you can never really know how you’ll handle this kind of emergency until you’re in it. I mean, sure, you can make contingency plans until you’re blue in the face and the cows have come home and the fat lady is all out of breath, but they don’t mean a damn thing when you’re right there, staring at the frayed ends of what used to be your child’s salvation.

So, there I was. I was finally in it, you know? Like in it for real? Everything had hit the fan and I had to choose: Leave Adrian in the death trap, or lift him out of his seat and walk all the way over to the cart return to get a new cart.

I froze. I admit it. There seemed to be no good answer. Because even if I did manage to somehow get Adrian out of the cart he was in, there was no guarantee that there would even be a cart with a working tiny buckle and thin strap waiting for me at the other end of what I knew would be an epic journey. On the other hand, sitting in a cart with no seat belt is the shopping equivalent of loading a revolver with 5 bullets and handing it to your drunk friend.

I won’t tell you what I chose. I think this is one of the truly divisive issues in parenting today and I don’t want to get blogged at.

(P.S. The cart return was at least eight feet away. One does not simply walk into the Safeway cart return area.)

My baby sister just had a baby of her very own. Babies having babies. I know she’s 31, but she’ll always be 6, chasing me around, trying to get me to play with her.

Now I get to chase her around and try to get her to give me that baby for a minute.

This is my nephew, and I love him.

Thoughts from the backseat on a drive into school: “Daddy,” she begins, “maybe this is all just a play.”

Shakespearean supposing. Then, later: “I know, I know! Maybe we are all in somebody’s dream!”

Cartesian consideration.

I ask, importantly, “What do you think it would mean if we were all in a dream? Would mommy and daddy still love you?”

“Yep,” she replied, certain despite Descartes.

Yep.

…I now teach music to 7-12 year olds.

It’s the details that make or break a good lie.