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Just when my friends are going in the opposite direction and buying 3-ton penis accessories, I finally got my Prius yesterday. All that nice stuff about fuel economy and low emissions aside, it’s the coolest car I’ve ever owned. We splurged on the package with all the bells and whistles: GPS, Bluetooth phone interface, a rearview camera, input jack for my iPod, leather seats. It doesn’t even make you take the keys out of your pocket; you just walk up, open the door, and push a button to drive. It’s been a long time since I actually wanted to drive anywhere in the city, and this afternoon I programmed the GPS for fun and drove all the way to the far north side just to go to Metropolis Coffee.

One person who may not be impressed with the wonders of Hybrid Synergy Drive technology is Carter. After we sold the PT Cruiser, we borrowed our friend Tim’s Pathfinder while he was on vacation. I made a point to always refer to it as “Tim’s car” around Carter so he wouldn’t get the idea that he’d be rolling in another gigantic SUV, but every time he got in he said, “This my car. This my car forever.” I asked him, “So you like Tim’s car, huh?” “Love it,” he said. He did seem excited at the Toyota dealer yesterday though, looking through the windows and shouting, “PREEEE-US!” like it was some wayward dog. I’m still reading the manual, but I think it can actually play fetch too.

Last night Debbie and I were flipping through channels after dinner. We’ve both been beaten around the temples by various annoyances; nothing serious, just life’s little stressors, but we needed some mindless entertainment. She landed on the Miss Teen USA pageant, and just as I was starting to feel creepy watching 16-year-olds in a swimsuit competition, Carter started dancing to the music, twirled around, and said, “Boobies!” Somehow I managed to tough it out until the question and answer segment.

Yesterday, I did something I rarely do, something that should get my sports fan’s membership card revoked: I left Wrigley Field early. The Cardinals were finishing a soggy, wraparound series against the Cubs, a series that, when I bought the tickets back in June, I never expected to have any significance in the standings. Now, by dint of some good starting pitching, a sudden infusion of offense, and poor play on the part of the erstwhile division leaders from Milwaukee, the Cardinals are suddenly a contender, and left town yesterday just three games behind the now division-leading Cubs.

My official statement on yesterday’s actions is that it’s my wife’s fault. She had to get to a meeting, and couldn’t sit through an hour and a half rain delay. Under her influence, I reasoned that it was silly for us to leave separately, even if we were going different directions, plus I needed to be home by 6:00 to relieve the babysitter. What I didn’t admit out loud was that, as a Cardinals fan, I was a little bit afraid of how the game would turn out. At the time, they were leading 6-4. With three innings left, the game could have ended two ways: A) nothing happens, the Cardinals win, and if I leave I wouldn’t have missed anything important, or B) the Cubs come from behind to win, and I have to sit there in my red hat and t-shirt and take it. I decided I’d rather not witness scenario B, which thankfully didn’t happen.

During the seven innings I did stay put, I got to witness the Rick Ankiel phenomenon, version 2007, for the first time in person. I never saw him play as a pitcher, but I was just as infatuated with his raw talent and potential as every other Cardinals fan. During his rookie season in 2000, before his infamous bout of wildness in the playoffs, I used a picture of him as my wallpaper on my computer at work. He was exciting; he threw hard and had a nasty curve that buckled your knees even when you were watching on TV. He even wore his stirrups high like I used to when I played. I followed along on the internet at work that fateful afternoon when he threw five wild pitches against the Braves in the division series, cursing the bad luck but thinking it was just rookie jitters. I was sick to my stomach when it continued into the next year, and like every Cardinals fan after that, I watched with pity as he fell apart and descended to the lowest levels of the minors.

There’s nothing that hasn’t been said already in the national media about Ankiel’s amazing comeback as a power-hitting outfielder, so I won’t say more. But what’s become apparent after yesterday’s game though, is that Ankiel is no longer an inspirational novelty. He’s turned into a contributing member of a Cardinals lineup that is suddenly putting up a lot of runs. In the first inning, he smoked a double into the left field gap, and later he added an important insurance run with an opposite field home run into the rain in the seventh.

But the play that said the most about how far Rick Ankiel has come since he failed as a pitcher happened when he was playing defense. In the bottom of the first, the Cubs’ Ryan Theriot hit a ball to the wall in left. Ankiel tracked it back and tried to make a leaping catch, but missed and crashed into the ivy. The ball bounced away toward the infield. Theriot rounded second base and tryied to leg out a triple, but Ankiel recovered, picked up the ball and fired a missile to Scott Rolen at third, who caught the ball on one hop and tagged out Theriot with room to spare. It may have been the best strike Ankiel has ever thrown.

I went home last night, got on eBay, and bought one of those jersey t-shirts with Ankiel’s old pitching number 66 on the back. Before this season, it would have seemed a little mean-spirited, reveling in his failure for the sake of an annoying, self-consciously ironic joke. But now I see it as a way to say that I was rooting for him the whole time, and even when he was stuck in the bush leagues, trying to figure out why he couldn’t do what he’d done so well his entire life, I hoped he could find his way back.

UPDATE – Okay, so I had to take some of this back.

So maybe we sold the hoo-ride a little too soon. It looks like Mr. Gore is going to be late with our Prius; it’s on a train from Portland (of course), and won’t be here until end of next week/early next week. All I know is that guy better hurry. Carter hates riding to the grocery store on my handlebars.

My primary computer, a Mac Mini hooked up to a badass, 24-inch Cinema Display, is sending out distress signals. The hard drive is dying, and that’s bad news. It’s not a complete disaster because I have backups, and I also have a laptop that I can use to do anything I need until it’s fixed, but I’m still a little unsettled. I’m a creature of habit, and I had really gotten used to that rig.

You may remember what happened the last time I tried to replace a hard drive in one of my computers. When do-it-yourself repair instructions for a comptuer involve putty knives and the phrase “satisfying pops,” I think it’s best to let the pros handle it, so I put in a request last night with Other World Computing to ship it away and let them do the work. And since it seemed a shame to go to all that trouble and get the same machine back, I’m also having them upgrade it with a monster 250 GB drive and an obscene 3 GB of RAM. If all goes well, I’ll basically have a new computer by the end of the week.

This summer, Carter stayed with Debbie’s parents while she and I went away to Washington, D.C. for a wedding. They brought him home on a Sunday afternoon, shortly after we returned. We live inside a courtyard, so after we buzzed them in the front gate, we went outside to meet them, expecting Carter to be overjoyed to see us. But instead of running headlong toward us and doing a perfect form tackle around the thighs, he barely acknowledged us, screaming, “Play at Grammy’s house!” and running away, clutching the new toy truck they had given him.

Now of course, every kid loves to hang out with their grandparents. They play with them, buy them ice cream, and take them to the park. They think it’s cute when they sing the alphabet at the top of their lungs at 6:00 a.m., and always give in on that extra episode of Dora. But what bothers me about Carter is that he enjoys his time with everyone else immensely, whether it’s Debbie’s parents, my parents, aunts and uncles, the Gymboree teacher, or any of the other babysitters we employ on a regular basis. Anyone but his parents, apparently, who will only do when none of those other fun people are around.

I can’t blame him though; those people are fun. When our regular babysitter Sylvia comes over one day a week so I can get out of the house, Carter tears around the house, shouting, “Eeeyah here! Eeeyah here!” In no time she’s packed him up for a morning of sandboxes and swings at the park. When they’re not outside, she’s constantly playing with him, helping him line up his cars just so, building Lego trucks, and putting together his favorite puzzle a dozen times in a row. It’s enough to make me feel like the laziest parent in the world.

I’m afraid that’s because at times, I am the laziest parent in the world. Debbie and I usually let Carter watch TV in the morning so we can eat breakfast and read the news. After we get dressed and Debbie goes to work, he mostly keeps himself entertained, playing in his room while I check email and tend to other important matters on the internet (Deadspin, The Onion, you know). This often takes up most of the morning until it’s time to walk the dog, then after lunch I spend the next two hours trying to convince him to take a nap. After he wakes up from his nap until Debbie comes home, I putter around the house, cleaning up and doing miscellaneous chores while he plays or watches more TV. Of course, I humor him with a trip to the park, some reading, or Lego building here and there, but nothing on the scale of what Sylvia, or any of our other regular sitters, does. I spend most of the time dreaming about what I could be getting done if I were by myself: books I could be reading, articles and blog posts I could be writing, baseball games I could be watching … anything but putting together those fucking train tracks again.

I know how this must sound like to the kind of people who say, “Oh I’d do anything to spend that kind of time with my kids” when I tell them what I do. No one carries that burden of guilt more than I do. And it’s not like I’m shirking responsibility because Carter is difficult; on the contrary, he’s pretty fun to be around these days. But regardless of his relative good behavior, I always feel like I’d rather be doing something else.

I’ve long had a habit of dragging my feet on things that I don’t want to do, or don’t seem important relative to other things on my mind. At my first job, I worked at a client site in Florida for five months, implementing/beta testing a massively complicated software package from Microsoft, called BizTalk. My project manager was extremely organized and efficient, but she knew how to wield her powers. She never micromanaged, and was almost apologetic about being so together, meekly asking us for status reports and test results. After a few weeks though, we started to clash. She had her priorities, i.e. making sure the project’s trains ran on time, and I had mine, like twiddling with obscure technical configurations and planning happy hours with my co-workers. She trusted me enough to let me set my own schedule, because I always finished what she needed in time, but I probably rolled my eyes one too many times or sighed too heavily when she asked for updates and project plans. This came up during a performance review; she called me “fiercely independent,” a title I still wear proudly today.

I’m ashamed to admit that this foreshadowed the way I spend my days with Carter now. The most important thing in the world to him one day might be building that puzzle, but I’m too busy monkeying with this website to be bothered. He’s learned how to combat this. He has no qualms about slamming the lid on my laptop and saying, “Close ‘puter now, Daddy,” plus has a black belt in the ancient art of tantrum-fu. But just because the kid knows how to remind me that I’m neglecting him, doesn’t mean I don’t feel like a douche when he does.

I realize that even the best babysitters and most enthusiastic grandparents would get tired of nonstop playtime after a few days. We’d all go batty (or work at Gymboree) if we didn’t. It’s like the weekend parent phenomenon I wrote about last year, where the parents who spend the least amount of time with their kids feel the most pressure to make every moment count when they do. I don’t feel that need to build the puzzle 42 times in a row in one day, because I did it 11 times yesterday and 18 the day before. I can’t begrudge his looking forward to those babysitter days when his agenda reads “9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. — PARTY.” It’s a matter of his perspective anyway; he forgets about the last ten “no’s” as soon as I say “yes.” But his short-term memory is far more forgiving than my long-term model, which reliably files away all those squandered opportunities.

I’m absolutely convinced that I am the world’s most efficient and productive writer–that is, if I could do all my writing while lying bed, trying to go to sleep. In that 30 minutes to an hour between the time I set my book down or turn off the TV, I can compose pages upon pages of fabulous material: new ideas, blog posts, responses to particularly insightful or infuriating articles I read during the day, revisions. Some nights, if my mind is really going, this will keep me awake for hours.
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My latest piece for Chicago Sports Weekly is out this week, a behind the scenes look at Comcast SportsNite. I spent an evening at the CSN studios a few weeks ago while they shot an episode of their nightly sports roundup. I spoke to the producers, checked out the set, and traded makeup tips with the anchors. I was a little disappointed that Mark Schanowski wasn’t more like Ron Burgundy in real life (he’s actually very nice), but if Pat Boyle comes asking around, you don’t know me.

Another little part of that teenager who used to cruise Green River Road in Evansville, blasting the 69 Boyz on his Rockford Fosgates, died today. I sold my PT Cruiser and its rims at CarMax. We’ve decided to go green; Al Gore himself will be personally delivering a metallic gray Prius sometime in the next few weeks, so the most gangster car in the West Loop had to go. I’m excited about this, of course. We just test drove a Prius and it was amazing. But alas, there was so much I had left to do with you, PT: the neon undercarriage lights , the six-inch wide muffler, the TV screens in the headrests, the crown air freshener. May you find a better home in the strip mall parking lots of the suburbs.

The barista class yesterday was excellent, and I’m happy to report that I was able to sleep last night. We didn’t actually consume that much coffee during the class; most of it was poured down the sink because, you know, they make the stuff and it’s free, and because most of what we students made was crap. While I learned a ton yesterday, I was also rather ashamed to see how many things I was doing wrong at home. Now, after a day spent trying to learn from my mistakes, I’m more frustrated than ever.

It was almost better being blissfully unaware that I was using way too much water, or way too little milk, or storing my beans so that they probably went stale in two hours, because I still thought it tasted good. Now that’s all kind of ruined. But the nice thing is that now I’ll be obsessed with doing it better, meaning I’ll have at least one vocation that doesn’t involve either staring at a computer or cleaning up some sort of feces.