I’ve been a little lazy about getting around town since I bought a hybrid car. When faced with a decision whether to drive or take public transit, too often I opt for the former out of sheer selfishness, rationalizing that since I’m using roughly half the fuel as everyone else, I’m allowed to drive twice as much. But now that gas costs north of $4.00 a gallon, promising only to go higher, that choice is no longer about a squishy, moral obligation to reduce consumption and preserve the planet. It’s starting to get expensive. And since I live in Chicago, a city with an extensive public transit system, I’ve decided to ride the train or the bus whenever possible. I might have been shamed into it because I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I figure that since I already went crazy replacing all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents, it’s the next best thing I can do.
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The other night, Debbie took Carter to one of her appointments. She was doing what realtors call a “walk-through,” where the buyer gives a place a final once-over before they close the next day, just to make sure the seller didn’t leave any holes in the walls or dead cats in the freezer on their way out. They’re usually a pretty low-stress affair (I often get asked to fill in at them, if that tells you anything), so having a three-year-old in attendance didn’t matter.

When they finally got home, I asked how it went. “Oh it was fine, but he would not shut up.” Welcome to my world lady.
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Just like the first time we were expecting a baby, suggestions for potential names have been flooding my inbox since I broke the news. Debbie and I don’t have any particular names in mind, so we appreciate the help. The last time we just settled on Carter so we wouldn’t have to write his name on the tags of all his shirts.

Coincidentally, the Social Security Administration also just released their list of the most popular names from 2007, so between that and your fine suggestions, we have plenty of ideas. But to save you some time, I’d again like to provide a list of names culled from those two sources that we will NOT be naming our baby girl.
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“There’s no heartbeat. The baby died,” my wife, Debbie, said on the phone, sobbing. This is how I found out about her first miscarriage. I hadn’t gone to the doctor’s appointment with her that time. It was her second pregnancy. She had sailed through the first one, and our son, Carter, then two-years-old, was happy and healthy. I didn’t need to go to every OB appointment this time. It was old hat, something only nervous, first-time dads do. I stood there in my kitchen, helpless. Now, an ultrasound technician, a stranger, was telling my wife she’d had a miscarriage, and all I could do for her is repeat, “I’m so sorry” into the phone.

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Spend enough time around a three-year-old, and you get pretty good at answering the question, “Why?” I’ve taken the approach of answering Carter as scientifically and truthfully as possible, partly because the longer the answer, the more likely he is to accept it as fact and not ask me again. But it’s also a good test to see if I really know what I’m talking about. I like to say that the final exams for any kind of engineer, architect, mechanic, or technician should consist of a room of preschoolers, pointing at a machine and saying, “What’s this do? Why?”
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Every time Carter passes a major milestone or has some new experience, I appreciate my parents even more. This isn’t out of some, “Gosh, I owe them so much” sort of sepia-tone nostalgia, but rather a simple realization of what a colossal pain in the ass it is dealing with a 2-year-old in these situations. Basically, I respect them for not leaving me on a curb somewhere and never looking back.

This year was Carter’s third Halloween, but the first where he actually understood that it meant dressing up and getting free candy. I’m not exaggerating when I say he was stoked, to the point where we had to convince him each morning for a week that it wasn’t Halloween yet, and that there weren’t going to be people handing out Skittles on the streets. We signed up for four separate parties (city kids don’t get to wander door-to-door like I did back in small town Indiana), and put together two different costumes, a store bought Spiderman suit and an improvised Bob the Builder getup, complete with tools and a hard hat.
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Last month I bought a Toyota Prius. Like anyone who buys one, it imbued me with a sense of smug self-righteousness. Nevermind that I paid nearly twice as much as I would have for a comparably equipped domestic car, that extra money was a license to feel superior to those unrepentant louts still paying $3.50 to drive a mere 17 miles per gallon. When I purred into my garage, coasting on battery power, that sound told me I was Doing the Right Thing; I made a personal choice to do my part to make the world a better place, and it felt good.
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This week I wanted to try something new. Since I’m being held captive in my home by a tyrannical 2-and-a-half year-old who marches around the house demanding fruit chewy snacks while my wife is off galivanting around San Diego, I don’t have much chance to engage in the cafe lifestyle as it were, sitting around sipping aperitifs, discussing the matters of the day with other great minds. So I decided to engage in such a discussion on the interwebs, domain of those with no social lives, with someone who actually has one, my friend and esteemed Time Out Chicago web editor, Scott Smith. When he’s not trading barbs with Richard Marx, he also writes on his own blog, Our Man in Chicago.
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While I don’t normally write about sports here, I thought should post some sort of reaction to the news yesterday that Rick Ankiel of the Cardinals had taken human growth hormones. When I saw the headline yesterday morning, I was still thinking about his amazing two home run, seven RBI performance against the Pirates Thursday afternoon. I didn’t even read the story; instead I closed my browser and took my dog outside for a walk. When I came back I looked at the computer again, hoping somehow it wouldn’t still be there, which of course it was.
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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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