Busyness, et cetera

If you find yourself taking a mid-morning nap, you are probably either a baby or a parent who drove her kid to work at the local Coffeebux at 5:00 a.m. But even if I had been awake all morning, I don't think I would have found anything much to comment on. The latest stories on blowhard Donald Trump, racist blowhard Jeremiah Wright, or presidential blowhard Barack Obama just aren't very interesting.

I did enjoy this article a friend sent to me yesterday: The Busy Trap by Tim Kreider. A bit:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

(Beware the "busy mom" syndrome. Take a nap.)

I also enjoyed Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt (subscribe here), especially the part about bringing his little guys to Starbucks on Sunday mornings:

Sometimes on Sundays I take my boys to a Starbucks, get them snacks and a Sunday paper, and we read the comics pages together. I figure this is a family tradition that won't live on for much longer; actual dead-tree newspapers may be a rare sight by the time they grow up. We have our local Starbucks, and the staff there is warm, and welcoming, and immensely patient about the thermonuclear explosion of crumbs and spills that my boys inevitably leave in their wake.

But a few weeks ago, we went to a different Starbucks, one not far from a playground in one of Arlington's nicer neighborhoods. And the clientele was . . . different. You know the type: Beard. Skinny. Vintage t-shirt. Probably a piercing or two, definitely a tattoo. If they lived in New York, they would live in Brooklyn.

And while none of these guys fainted in the presence of two small boys demanding updates on the latest from Brewster Rockit, Red and Rover, and Spiderman, I definitely got the feeling that our presence was disruptive to their perusal of the New York Times book-review section or their work on their screenplay. Nothing vocal, just regular disapproving looks in our direction. How dare a breeder like myself desecrate their temple of almost-urban cool.

I dare not lash out too much at slackers; a couple of wrong turns in life and I could easily have turned into a character in a Kevin Smith movie. But if parenthood is indeed the harder choice, it would be nice if appreciation of it could be found more widely in society. Hey, you in the Starbucks comfy chair, in the retro glasses, carrying your stuff in a messenger bag, looking at my boys as if they're pint-sized Huns coming to sack Rome -- there's a whole world out there beyond your comfortable, sheltered existence, full of poop and runny noses and toilet-training misadventures and stepping on a Lego piece barefoot in the middle of the night. We're only ensuring the propagation of the species, fellas. A little patience for our brief interruption of your child-free world would be appreciated.

Make of that what you will. All I can say is I do hope we aren't so far gone demographically that having two kids now qualifies one as a "breeder." As a grand multipara, I object to that.

(I wish I could find @HonestToddler's series of tweets on his Starbucks cookie meltdown which ended with his tantrum being filmed by a hipster, but it's lost in the Twitterverse. I did just find this funny Hipster Dad interview with the HT.)

Politics later, I guess. It should be getting more interesting as we near the election, but it's just the same old same old. Or maybe it's just me.

***
Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

Most recent posts here. Follow us on Twitter here. Amazon store here.