The Irony Of Working On A Show About A Guy Living Two Lives

I'll level with you. My brain went oatmeal on me somewhere around tuesday. I haven't been sleeping alot, and there's at least ten other things I should be doing, eleven if you feel that paying your taxes is important, so you'll have to forgive me if this entry starts to feel more like a letter from a mental hospital than the work of someone paid to arrange words into sentences.

Let me just start by saying that I love my freaking job. I've never been happier to be tired. I wake up from four hours of sleep literally dying to get to work. Except for the night I had some awful Chinese food and woke up literally dying to get to the bathroom. In the past two weeks I've watched incredible actors bring characters and words to life in ways I could never have imagined, had the surreal experiencing of scouting my own hometown for locations, and been invited to a straight up HOLLYWOOD celebrityfest simply because I was dressed so poorly I made the person taking me look good by comparison. I know it's all too good to be true and too fun to last, and every day I'm surprised when I'm not hit by a bus.

However, being a weekend dad, or sometimes fraction of a weekend dad, sucks. Every time I get picked up from the airport I feel like the girls are a foot taller and less sure who I am. I get tears in my eyes when they don't want me to touch them. I get tears in my eyes when they give me a giant hug. I more or less just walk around teary eyed. I used to wonder if I would ever be able to summon the thoughts to cry on camera. Now I'm confident I could be there in about 30 seconds.

Amy has been heroic, as have our parents who now essentially live on our dining room floor. They do all of this so that I can can play pretend with an incredibly talented bunch of strangers. How do you say thanks for that? Fruit basket? Vacation home? I'll ask my assistant.

I don't really have an assistant.

Although, if anyone out there is dying to organize my taxes...

You're Just Going To Give Me This Candy?

You know what's awesome? Making a TV show. Bear in mind that I know as much as you about how to do it, less if you happen to know anything at all, but it's like waaaaay fun. Like being handed a multimillion dollar box of legos and instructions in Urdu (that's a language. I spent about twenty minutes trying to think of a funny sounding language. See how qualified I am for this job?) and then being told that you have six weeks to assemble them in the shape that entertains all of America or you and everyone you know will lose their jobs. High stakes legos, that's my new dream job.

You know what's not awesome? Apparently it's having your husband go play with legos while you tend to three children. Amy and I's conversations have started to fit a pattern: I ramble about meeting this person and starting that thing and how much free soda I'm getting and Amy says that's great and then starts to cry, which she usually only does when having limbs amputated, and then through tears she assures me that REALLY, it's GREAT, and she's 100% totally FINE. It seems Mr. Mars stint as a wonderbaby was short lived and he's begun an anti-sleeping campaign and Amy sits up night after night as he states his case, then greets the girls for a daily dose of two two year olds. She is thus unmoved by news of an unlimited supply of gummy worms.

Hopefully this all magically goes away because, as you know, bad things often magically go away if you completely ignore them and just hope for the best. In the meantime I have legos to stack and gummy to ingest, and all of it will be hard and awful and the fact that it is awesome will be our little secret.

p.s. We still need to talk about Stacey and you people finding her a husband so that she will not go home and get stabbed in the heart with a bicycle spoke. I'm going to get back to you on this, but I'll expect you to have some viable candidates ready next time we chat.

My Other New Baby

When, at some future date, you are reading about the poor decision making that led to the demise of Fox Broadcasting you'll know that it started here.

What began as a visit to possibly the flattest and brownest place on Earth will now be at least one hour of television about flatness and brownness. It could all go horribly wrong, but I suspect that at a bare minimum we'll get a pretty trainwreck out of it. It's hard and occasionally forbidden to write about work, but I'll keep you in the loop to the extent possible.

If you wish to send congratulatory cookies I will name extras after you.

If Only I Could Get The Cat And The Kids To Throw Up On Each Other Instead Of Me

Hey Internet,

See how quickly you can fall off the wagon? Add one extra baby and you go from daily to semi-annual posting like that.

Here's some things you should know:

Mars is awesome. He doesn't look or act like any of us and obviously belongs to a family of cute and quiet monks, which is why we plan to keep him forever. His best features are - he never cries, he sleeps all the time, there is only one of him. I really can't stress that last part enough. If you're planning on having children I highly recommend you do it one at a time. One week into life with the twins I had already investigated moving to Canada and changing my name and twice caught Amy putting her luggage in the car in the middle of the night 'just to make sure it still fit'. One week into Mars and no one is trying to escape, though there has been talk of pre-pre-pre boarding school for the girls on some other continent.

The girls love Mars. They love to scream at him, and squeeze him, and poke him in the eye. Their growing vocabulary has collapsed to a single word. BABY! They wake up and go to bed saying it, and scream it every second in between. They simply vary the punctuation, usually in rapid succession. Baby? (Are you the baby?) Baby. (I wish to see the baby) BABY! (There is the baby, let's see if my foot fits in his ear!)

Ripley has become my mortal enemy. Her new trick is sticking her entire hand down her throat until she vomits. FOR FUN! You haven't seen evil until it crawls into your lap, makes itself puke on you, and then laughs. Now in addition to watching out for the 'store and spew' technique she was working on last week, I have to constantly be on guard when her hands head anywhere toward her face. She knows I'm looking for this and often raises her hand towards her mouth only to then scratch her nose and give me a little grin that says 'psyche!' Nixie has been trying to get in on the act and can get her hand in her mouth but thankfully seems to be having trouble finding her vomit button. In effect she just runs around chewing on her fist. Even when she's trying to be evil it comes out cute.

I turned in my project. It will certainly come back to me, likely with a strongly worded legal letter about failure to meet minimum standards for competency and so forth, but until then it's just the hurling twins, the baby monk, and the first video game I've owned in like a decade. I'll be up late destroying invading armies and gaining seven pounds for every one that Amy loses until further notice. I will try to return to a more regular diet of blogging once I have saved the planet.

Welcome To Earth, Mars

Mars Bar,

Well, here we are, mere hours from the first of hundreds and hundreds of shared birthdays (assuming you follow instructions and have my head properly frozen). I've gotten lots of birthday presents over the years, but this will be hard to top. I'm going to let someone else unwrap you though. Ick.

Sadly, you've beaten me to the finish line. Even if I stayed up all night I wouldn't finish my work before you got here. When I asked for another extension they told me I could take all the time I needed as long I handed it in by Monday. So, it looks like I'll be holding you with one hand and typing with the other.

Which frankly is indicative of the crappy reception you've gotten all the way around. When your sisters came it was a life altering production. I was an unemployed hobo (as opposed to those employed hobos you're always seeing) terrified that they would turn me into a minivan driving cliche. I didn't know if I really wanted kids, but I was sure I wanted to be more than just a parent. I wanted my life to matter for its own sake. And I thought no one would ever see me as anything but the thing pushing the stroller. None of which has come to pass, except for the minivan, which frankly was your fault. The point is, the night before the girls came felt sort of like I was jumping off a bridge. With you I feel more like I'm picking someone up at the airport. Which is to say that being second can suck, something I'm sure you'll understand as I try to stuff you into your sisters' pink hand me downs in the coming years.

But it also means you get much better parents than your sisters did. Frankly, we're pros at this now and every bump, bruise, backward diaper, or chewed tube of vulva cream that they've endured is one less you'll have to put up with. And you'll get something they never had, older siblings to love, hug, and probably dress you up in ways that may lead to gender confusion. I guess that part's kind of a mixed bag.

But what will never be second is how much you're loved. If seeing your sisters towering over the tiny clothes laid out for you today has taught me anything, it's that all this goes by in a flash. I can't promise that when you walk I'll react like I've never seen first steps before. But I assure you I'll react like I'm never going to see them again.

So enjoy your last night in another world. Tomorrow you become the new center of ours.

A Study In Heroism

Mars Bar,

A very sweet, if terribly misguided, young man wrote to me today to tell me that I'd 'kind of become his personal hero' which obviously doesn't bode well for him and says a lot about his low threshold for heroism, but I wrote back and asked him to feel free to tell me more and if he felt the need to use capital letters or express his admiration in the form of a poem, song, or letter to the NY Times I encouraged him not to hold back. Long story short, we're now best friends and I'm trying to adopt him in the hopes he'll let me call him Mojo.

Certainly, it's easy to minimize this occurrence. After all, people do regularly write to prison inmates saying how much they admire their work and occasionally proposing marriage, and I won't lie, I was a little disappointed that the 'M' word didn't even come up in his letter. Also, for every 'you're my hero' mail I get (so far, just the one) I also recieve about a thousand 'you're a moron and I wish someone would set you on fire' mails. And that's just counting the ones from your mom. Ba Zing! Point being, the internet is a fickle mistress that occasionally makes you feel warm, fuzzy, and egotistical but mostly makes you feel like we're headed for an apocalypse brought on by an epidemic of poor spelling and cat videos.

Anyway, by the time you're old enough to form an opinion, what's left of me will probably appear more doughnut than human, and the idea that you yourself could admire the man who slaps a lawnmower engine on your bicycle instead of giving you a car for your 16th birthday will no doubt seem absurd. But I will then refer you back to this post and you will see that for one brief moment just before you were born, someone, possibly intoxicated and almost certainly deranged, felt that I was hero material. And you will say, that's great Dad, can I please just have the keys to my lawnmower bike? And I will say, no, not until you bring me a doughnut.

Hat

Mars Bar,

Just rolling stream of consciousness style tonight. Between work, trying to organize a green card marriage for Stacey, and your impending arrival I just don't have time to organize my thoughts into a focused, crafted, and hilarious piece. As the mall Santa used to say when I was a kid, 'just be glad you're getting anything."

I'm not really trying to organize a greencard marriage, but that's only because Stacey seems really resistant to it. Instead we've been looking at sending her to school so she can stay. It sounded good until we started making the schedule and realized that she'd spend every hour of her life either writing freshman compositions or watching three bizarrely named children. Once she sits on that for a few days my craigslist husband hunt might start to seem more attractive.

Your mom's been home on maternity leave for a week now which means that the girls have had no use for me. Ripley and I had a breakthrough tonight in which she not only acknowledged my presence but seemed thankful for it. The only catch was that I had to be wearing her as a hat. The minute she came off my head things were unsatisfactory and she explained that to me with her fists. It's nice that she's learned to say, "HAT! HAT!" but if feels a little weird that it means she wants to BE your hat. I take what I can get.

The middle name derby, which long ago stopped be interesting to anyone else, just keeps getting messier. Instead of narrowing down the choices Amy just keeps throwing more in. Canyon? Baron? Wren? Some of her suggestions are just noises. Tull? Also, Mars Canyon? What if we just name you Mountain Top? I think you're just going to have like nine middle names. Mars Cooper Mojo Canyon Jethro Tull Killen.

But I'll make you a deal. You call me Pilot and I'll call you whatever you want.