Emily's Lunchtime Adventure

I would like to share a charming story.

This is my daughter, Emily. She's 18 months old.


And, y'know, just for reference, this is my lovely wife Sheila, and me. Dressed as ninjas.

Anyway, back to Emily. Like many children, one of Emily's first words was "no." Well, actually, it sounds more like "mmboh," but we get the point when she says it. Which she does. Frequently. Usually accompanied by a near-frantic waving of her hand from side to side, often in an attempt to slap whatever it is she's objecting to.

I had to stay at home with Emily for a day last week because she was feeling sick. At lunch time, I heated some chicken tenders for her and a big plate of tater tots for me (yes, tater tots as a meal, don't you judge me).

Everything went smoothly at first. I brought our food to the living room, plopped the little darling down into her playpen and started feeding her. After every few bites of chicken, I would give her a tater tot.

This is what the scientific community (of which I am not a member, but I signed up for their mailing list so I could get a free football phone) refers to as a "bad idea."

After a couple of tater tots, little Emily realized that this, indeed, is where it's at, and would have no more of this "chicken" business. Here is a rough (and abbreviated) estimation of the conversation that ensued:

Me: "Here, Emily, have another bite of chicken."

Emily: "mmboh."

Me: "What? You don't want more chicken?"

Emily: "mmboh." [points towards my tater tots]

Me: "Ohhh, no. Have a few more bites of chicken, and then you can have a tater tot." [offering another bite of chicken]

Emily: "mmbooooohhh." [waves hand furiously]

Me: "Eat some chicken!" [puts a bit of chicken in Emily's hand]

Emily: "..." [paces around playpen for a few seconds, looks at me, and drops the chicken on the floor]

Me: "Hey, don't do that. You gotta eat it." [I put another bit of chicken up to her mouth, which she grudgingly takes]

Emily: "..." [chews the chicken twice and spits it out] "mboh."

Me: "Can't have tater tots until you eat the chicken. These are mine and those are yours."

Emily: "MMBBOOOOOHHHH!!!!" [more hand-waving]

Me: "All right, then I'll eat them all. Nyah." [shoving tater tots, one after the other, into my mouth] "Are you gonna have some chicken before I finish all the tots?"

Emily: "mmboh!" [points to the swiftly-vanishing tots]

Me: "Nope, not until you have some more chicken. [offering the chicken plate to Emily] Have another bite."

Emily: "mmboh!" [flails at the chicken, points to the tots again]

Me: "All right, then I'll eat all those too." [chowing down on some now-lukewarm chicken] "Daddy needs protein too. Are you sure you don't want any?"

Yes, I sometimes talk to my daughter with my mouth full.

Emily: "mmboooooohhhhh!"

At this point there is exactly one tater tot left, and several pieces of chicken.

Me: "Look, Emily. There's one tater tot left. You can have it after you eat a few more bites of chicken."

Emily ponders this for a minute, and suddenly she can't have enough chicken. I give her one piece, and as soon as it's in her mouth she's reaching to the plate for another. She's shoveling cooked bird into her face with both hands like it's the last meal she'll eat until puberty.

When every last scrap of chicken is gone, and only then, she turns and points to the plate sitting in my lap, bearing the last survivor of the ruined tater tot empire. True to my word, I gave it to her. My friends, you may think you know what it is to see someone chewing away happily at a morsel of food, but you do not.

I am amazed at just how well she understood what I was telling her, and how stubbornly she refused to eat the stupid chicken until her last hope of having another tater tot was almost gone. It makes me wonder how many other times she's fully understood what I was telling her, and just played dumb to see how much she could get away with. For someone under the age of two, that's pretty devious.

This girl is going to be trouble.

This doesn't bode well.

Okay, so I was writing my last post and wanted to find a good synonym for "dislike." You know, one that wasn't quite as full of vitriol as "hate" or "loathe." So I typed "dislike" into the embedded search bar in my Firefox window, and before I could change the search engine from Google to Meriam-Webster, Google (which as we all know can have a very toddler-like exuberance towards being helpful and friendly) gave me the top ten most popular search terms that begin with "dislike."

Lookie:
I'm not sure what to make of that first (and by definition, most popular) one. Or the fact that Sarah Palin still registers on someone's radar enough for that person to Google her at all anymore, even if it is in the context of not liking her.

Draw your own conclusions.

Okay, you can stay on my lawn, just stop humping the garden Gnomes.

This is a follow-up of sorts on my last post, and an attempt to not just look like a crusty old man yelling at the neighborhood hooligans.

As much as I object to MySpace and Facebook, I do like the kernel of the idea of what they set out to accomplish. That said, if one absolutely must have their social networking fix, I think Virb is really a better option. I've had a Virb account for several months, haven't done much of anything with it because I'm lazy and boring, but I like the site. It's not as widely used or as popular as MyFace, and it doesn't offer much that Spacebook doesn't already have available, except for the absence of everything that makes MySpace and Facebook so very, very annoying. And that's enough for me. Virb is kind of minimalist and for the most part it doesn't get in your face. I like that.

Also, I feel compelled to share that I absolutely love social bookmarking. If you haven't already experienced the joys of sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, then you should, like right now.

(Except not ma.gnolia, because their servers are down at the moment and they've experienced data corruption/loss. Which really truly sucks because I prefer ma.gnolia to del.icio.us and I feel lost without access to all my ma.gnolia bookmarks.)

These sites rock because sometimes (often) I'm at a computer which I do not own and happen upon a cool, informative, or otherwise interesting site that I want to bookmark for later reference. Well, Foxmarks is great but I don't (for example) have Firefox at work. So, I turn to my trusty Ma.gnolia bookmarklet and all is well... when the service isn't hosed, at least. :( Social bookmarking not only lets you keep a repository of all your favorite sites on the web, but it is a phenomenal resource for finding information on whatever topic tickles your fanny. In some ways it's superior to using search engines, because search engines just give you whatever matches their algorithms decide are relevant, while with social bookmarking you can see what other people who share your interests have decided are actually relevant. It's like asking your buddies what movies they like instead of reading the stuffy newspaper reviews. Or something.

But you probably already knew all that. And if not, now you do. So, there. I've promoted something social. I'm not a curmudgeon.

My Struggle with Social Networking

I'm trying to like Facebook. I really am. I've had this Facebook account for a while, and I recently started trying to do something worthwhile with it, since so many of my MySpace friends are abandoning MySpace for the 'book.

For that matter, I've been trying to figure out a reason to like MySpace for a good while, too. At first it was great, I could keep up with all my friends, catch up with old pals from school or former jobs or wherever, and hey, I can write blogs too! Neat! There were all kinds of bands to discover, and I could customize my little "space" to look however I wanted.

However, despite having all the right pieces, MySpace utterly failed to do anything really useful with them (at least in my eyes). They were all there, they just never seemed to click and form anything cohesive. To make it worse, the MySpace community completely trashed the place with millions of tacky glittery-sparkly images and audio and video that plays automatically when you visit a page and countless nonsense survey bulletin spam and phishing attacks and "why am I not in your Top 8/12/20/n" drama... if you've spent any amount of time on MySpace then I don't even need to go on, you got the point before I made it.

And customization loses its luster when your only options are to use a template someone else designed (kind of the antithesis of "customizing"), or to try to wrap your brain around, and work within the confines of, an unbelievably lousy and poorly-thought-out table-based layout that forms the foundation of the site you're trying to make your own. That's not to say it can't be done, because I've seen some very unique and clever layouts. I'm just saying I don't think the amount of effort I'd have to put into it is worth the payout. I guess I'm a lousy web designer. I'd rather build my own structure from the ground up than have to wade through somebody else's terrible code and hammer away at it until it does what I want. Guess that's why I don't have a sweet code-monkey position with some big corporation.

But back to Facepalm... I mean Facebook. I can understand why everybody's ditching the 'space... but is Facebook actually a more attractive option? I don't see it. As I told one of my fellow new 'bookers (yeah I'm going wild with the apostrophes, shut up), it's just a glorified Rolodex. None of MySpace's customization options (not that I used them), no blogging capability, and even with nearly all of my e-mail notifications turned off, every week my inbox is still littered with all-important alerts that somebody I know has indeed passed gas or stepped on a kitten or inserted something into something else. Stop it. Hey, someone "wrote" on my "wall." You know what that's called? Graffiti. Except graffiti is art and this is not. And in some cases, this should be illegal, which graffiti is, but should not be.

What does Facebook have? Poking. Wow, somebody can poke me. I assume they mean this in the non-sexual sense, where somebody walks up and jabs you in the arm with their finger. When that happens in real life, I get annoyed. Was that not supposed to happen here? If so, something has gone awry. What else you got? Apps. Which serve no purpose other than to spur MySpace, who finds itself on the less-desirable side of the "cool" fence, into vainly shouting "hey, hey, we got Apps now too! See? Check out all these bitchin' Apps! Where are you going? Come back here!"

Admittedly, when I first read that Facebook was opening up its API to third-party developers, I thought it was a cool idea with a lot of potential. Then I read about the privacy and security concerns related to the way in which Apps work and how much data is made accessible to the App developers regarding their users (Yes, privacy and security concerns exist everywhere on the interwebs, but why voluntarily submit myself to them?). At that point my opinion turned from "Oh, that's kinda cool" to "Screw that." Apps have quickly devolved into the logical extension of chain mail and a very handy tool for spammers. I'm supposed to give some random coder access to my personal information, in exchange for the ability to grow virtual pot under my friends' virtual grow lamps? No thank you.

I'm just not a very social person, so I'm sure that explains my nigh-disdainful apathy towards "social networking." I'll keep trying to find something to validate my Facebook presence, though. If I'm missing something, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I will continue to simultaneously exist on the 'space and on the 'book, because I can't completely abandon either of them, since I have friends and acquaintances on each of them that only exist on that one and not the other. And you know, I might want to contact them now and then. Because I lost their phone number. Or never had it.