When you kill a king, you don't stab him in the dark. You kill him where the entire court can watch him die.

That quote was in my mind while I was dreaming last night. When I woke up I was thinking about how Obama could finish off Clinton.

It would be cool if he had enough SD’s on Tuesday night to get over the 2118 and the whole thing would be done. I guess he would need 5 extra so Clinton doesn’t complain about Michigan. I was watching some of that Michigan and Florida rules committee debate on Saturday because you can’t do a whole lot keeping a baby comfortable. When the whole thing was decided there were these women who supported Clinton who were all pissed off and said they were going to vote for McCain.

Seriously? You’re a woman who wanted to see a woman become the president for the first time, but you’re going to vote for a man who wants to put Supreme Court justices on the bench who would overturn RVW. Yeah, that will show the “man” how sexist he was in treating Hillary and you’ll help get the right to choose what you do with your body taken away. Great statement to the world. Two enthusiastic thumbs up. Brilliant idea.

Fucking idiots.

We’re heading back to the city I love on the 13th . Our friends from college are getting married at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens. I met Ehron while working part time as a Janitor at Meriter Hospital. We cleaned up the hospital together, and wasted time talking about music, video games, and philosophy. He didn’t go to school at the time. He was just working getting by, an interesting dude. He lived in the same building as my wife and I with his now fiancé.

I cleaned up his blood after he tried to kill himself. It wasn’t a halfhearted attempt either. He cut the long way. I visited him in the hospital, and let him know he had friends who cared about him. Like I’ve said before, when shit like that happens the world becomes crystal clear to you. I’m glad he’s alive. I’m glad he’s getting married.

I miss hanging out with Ehron.

As a semi-adult and full-blown adult, my friends have almost never been engineers or professionals. Professionals are dicks, as we’ve all seen, including myself.

Another chunk of wisdom my dad gave me, I think back in junior high, was that you shouldn’t treat people who do a job that may seem like bullshit any different than if they were doing your job. I believe it was in reference to the janitors at the junior high where he worked and I attended.

I’ve lived by that bit of wisdom. I probably have more respect for janitors, grocery store workers , butchers, and machinists than I do for doctors, lawyers, and engineers. I’ve done all of those “shit”, hard working, and lower education requirement jobs. They’ve been with some of the finest people I’ve ever met. Less bullshit, less tiptoeing around “sensitive” issues, less hubris and pretentious ass-hat-ery.

I feel kind of dirty

I was in one of those online mudslinging debates with a bunch of angry feminists.

I preface this by saying my wife would identify herself as a feminist. She’s made a choice that I think these angry feminists would abhor. She’s decided to get married, have children, and stay at home with them while they are young. (The horror!) My boss at work is an intelligent, strong woman who has the respect of her piers. The validation engineer, whom I go to for advice on testing is also a woman engineer, also intelligent and well respected. When I come to her seeking advice she takes the time to have a thoughtful discussion with me, free of personal attacks and thinking every word that comes out of my mouth is an attempt to show my male dominance over her.

I share in the housework; regardless of what it’s gender roll is considered. I also take an active role in raising our children. I cook dinner every night because I like to.

It turns out I’m a closet sexist.

Why?

I made the assertion that based on observing my son, and many other young children at our Attachment Parenting functions that very young children have a hard-wired propensity to play with gender specific toys.

Carter likes trucks and cars. He doesn’t like baby dolls.

I was met with rude personal attacks on my intelligence level and claims of being an “armchair scientist” and a sexist.

I never said that girls and boys CAN’T or SHOULDN’T or WON’T EVER play with opposing genders toys. I simply said they tend to gravitate to those toys and a certain type of play.

I was initially wrong in thinking that it was due to instincts from when we were uncivilized monkey men living to survive. It turns out that it’s actually hormonal, and studies were done that supported this, although I found them in an undergrad text (how yucky and common).

They disregarded these decade old studies and sited a study not specifically looking at children’s play and propensity to toy choosing, simply on hormones creating both boy and girl behavior in both sexes. I’m sure that study is true. It still doesn’t address my point. Carter wanted to dress and carry around a doll for about 2 days after Oz was born, but he was right back to the trucks and cars after he lost interest in the baby. I guess the rampant sexism in Sesame Street has thwarted our parenting attempts to let him play with any toys he wants.

I was then told that raising kids gives you no special knowledge.

The responsibility for another human being’s life doesn’t teach you anything, or give you any special insight into the human condition.

So I thought maybe I was crazy and I spoke to my validation engineer who has 3 kids, 2 boys and a girl. She was a successful woman. Did she see the same things as sexist Lawryde?

I asked her about it cold, without prefacing her to my debate. She agreed that her boys gravitate to boy toys and a rough type of play. I asked her if she thought it was a social thing or if it was just the way they were.

She thought it was just the way they were. I said, well are you sure that television and your parents and how you treat them doesn’t affect it. She said it would have some affect, WHICH I AGREE WITH. I talked to her about those first moments when they were just starting to choose what they like (around 1.5 years and 2) and asked her if they just kind of gravitated towards gender specific toys. She agreed and agreed that social factors would be almost non-existent at that point. We have different parenting styles so now I have a sample size of two with the same results and 10-year-old research that backs me up.

I then told her about my debate with these immature (still in school or just starting their real adult lives, no kids of their own, not responsible for anyone but themselves, but experts on child development, can’t see the forest for the trees, full of advanced degrees and debt from going to school but no idea how practical things work, knowing everything about me and my typical feminist thoughts, enlarge clitoris’ and labia that look like balls due to high androgen hormone levels during gestation, not understanding respect is something that is earned not implied, mad that I was, by all standard measures, smarter than all of them in high school and now make more money than they do and I’m happy with my loving beautiful family, should be wondering if maybe it’s not that I’m facing sexism on a daily basis, but that really I’m just a big fucking jerk and a terrible excuse for a human being.) (Was that just immature of me? Fuck it. This is my corner of the internet.) girls I knew from high school who were convinced that only social factors affect toy choice in children. She said that before she had kids she had some of the same thoughts, but after having both boys and girls she sees things differently.

The angry feminist will be talking about me now, because that’s what women do. Emails and text messages and phone calls. “Oh, my God. Look what Lawryde wrote. What a sexist asshole!” “He’s so predictable and stupid and his children are going to grow up objectifying women and raping goats.” “We’re so right, and so awesome and so much smarter and better than him.” “Yay, Us!”

I’m sad, it also looks like I lost a facebook friend. (Tear)

I feel clean now.

Full Text of Debate

And I think the modern philosopher Kanye West put it best:

Oswald Xavier: Oz to his friends

Born 10:55 pm at home in water naturally at 37 weeks one day.

Mom and baby are doing well.

I'm tired.

7lbs 6 ounces 19 3/4" long

Like a Nail in the Head

I’ve started a new test, so I’m not in the office now, which makes posting when I have moments of inspiration difficult.

I’ve got some time while my machine warms up now.

Last night sucked.

We went to Wal-mart to buy some stuff we needed for upcoming events. All the horrendous people there made me pretty sure they’re isn’t a God. Carter was terrible. My wife said he was happy and nice all day long.

When we got home I needed to grab a bin of clothes out of the attic so my wife could sort through it. Our attic is an unfinished side of our story-and-a-half. There is this support that runs the length of it that I need to bend down to get under. I moved some of the bins around and found the one I wanted as I bent under the support. My head moved up.

Sharp blinding pain in my skull. I made some sort of shouting noise. Louder than my normal "Shit I bumped my head" noise. Something was different about this pain. Something more. I closed my eyes and felt my head.

Blood?

I looked at the support. Some stupid sonofabitch decided to nail two 2X4’s together with a three and a half inch nail. About a quarter or half inch was sticking out the bottom. It had glanced off my skull and cut the skin.

I was angry and in pain. I had my wife clean up the wound and went and got my hammer like I was going to get a gun.

My blood pressure rose as I beat the shit out of every one of the spikes that this ignorant asshole (who I would guess is dead) decided to leave exposed in an area where people would be hunched over and crawling in.

I went down and took one and half times the recommended pain killers.

I contemplated if the nail had been longer. Would I have lost high school if I would have hit it square and hard enough? Would I have become a living zombie, drooling to communicate. One brief motion for a small lobotomy.

The extra painkillers made me drowsy. I slept with Carter, my wife woke me up when she went to bed. I massaged her hands to try and alleviate the pregnancy induced carpal tunnel and then went to sleep again.

Oh, oh--you ready to blow?! Well I'm a mushroom-cloud-laying motherfucker, motherfucker! … I'm Superfly TNT, I'm the Guns of the Navarone!

We had a hockey game last night. It was the first time in a long time that there was no joy for me at the end of the game.

Just anger, hate, and rage.

But before that, I dropped my son off at a friends house since my wife had an Attachement Parenting counsel meeting. They are one of our people with kids friends. The guy Dave is cool shit. We’ve hung out at some events together and he’s good people. He asked me if I had a minute before I went to the game. I said sure. He had some sort of super water that he wanted me to try. It had like additonal oxygen in it or something. More than the one atom per molecule aparently.

He gave me this little song and dance asking me to streatch prior to drinking it and him pushing down on my arms at my side. Then I drank it and I restreatched and he pulled down on my arms again and it seemed to improve both of those things. I don’t really think it was the water, but that’s just the skeptic in me. I told him if I scored like four goals I’d buy a case of the stuff.

Our leading scorer Phil was a man of his word and didn’t show up. Again, his choice, but we are worse off without him. If we end up playing Orange in the playoffs I’m going to try and convince him to play one last game with us. Since I think he’d enjoy knocking them off as much as all of us.

Now to the highlights:

The fist shift of the first period we looked pretty good. We ran the cycle in their zone had three or four shots on net, and one or two good scoring chances.

Then their ringer stepped onto the ice. When I put my team together, I tried to make a TEAM. I didn’t grab anyone from a higher league like several of the other teams in our league did.

He skates down, takes a shot from the top of the right circle and scores. My anger started to rise. They scored two more goals, one of which was a legitimate team type goal. I’ll give them that.

I was playing defense and this 20-year-old kid who thinks he’s hot shit was skating into the zone. I got in his way, poked the puck away from him and he ended up falling down through no fault of mine. He said some bullshit about me being too physical. I wasn’t aware that we were playing tennis so I told him, “Come get me Mother Fucker. Come get me.”

I was ready to fight.

I was ready to get ejected.

I wanted to breathe smoke.

In the second period this same kid held my stick while I was in the offensive zone and we were both working to get the puck. I tore at it to get it away, and he pulled me down while he was falling. I landed as hard as I could on him and told him to fuck off. We got matching minors and got to have a seat in the box.

When we got out, I was bringing the puck into their zone and as I passed it over to my teammate, his stick game up and clipped me in the cage. There was a loud clang. If I didn’t have a cage on it would have cut me or bruised me badly. No penalty for high sticking on him.

The ref had lost control of the game.

30 seconds left in the game, we’re losing four nothing. Our team is playing like shit. We’ve had critical failures on multiple fronts of our game. We’re all angry, and just want a hot shower at this point. Their ringer who had two of their four goals skates it up and tries to skate through one of our defensemen. Newton’s laws of motion take over and they both fall down. Mr. Ringer is pissed off even though it was his fault for trying to skate through our man.

He gets up and starts jawing at our defensemen. I skate up and stay out of the fray. They’re chest to chest telling each other how much they love each other. The whistle has blown already. Our goalie skates up and tells the ringer to have a nice day and step the fuck down.

He pushes our goalie.

I repeat. He pushes our goalie.

Some could consider me a dirty player, but hockey is a physical sport, and taking penalties and intimidating the other team is part of the game. There are certain things that I won’t do. I will not touch another team’s goalie.

I am Hindu and he is a cow as far as I’m concerned. The two cows can have at it if they want, but that isn’t my business. My business is keeping the other team’s players in line.

He pushed our fucking goalie. I’m about 4 strides away from the fray. I dig hard and he’s still trying to muscle our goalie around. I have a head of steam as I approach. I think for a second if I should jump on his back and tackle him. I decide a cross check to the back is more appropriate. My moment of hesitation puts me slightly off balance and I don’t get a clean hit on him, but I got my point across.

Everything is getting broken up at this point, and the ref says the game is over and orders the douche off the ice. He’s still smacking his lips. For whatever reason we play them again next Friday. I warned him. “You better not show up and play next Friday.” There will be blood.

I grabbed my sticks and water and skated off the ice, fuck handshakes and niceties. You make a run at my goalie I have no respect for your team or your players. Some of their players groaned about sportsmanship as myself and a couple of my other teammates didn’t shake hands. All I could see was red so I didn’t care.

Those additional atoms per molecule of oxygen must have been fueling my rage. I don’t know that I’ll be buying a case of the miracle water. I might need another shot before Friday’s game though.

Slice

Played hockey this evening. It was an embarrassing loss. Plus I got cut by a skate. More like nicked. I didn't realize it until the end of the game. Not quite as bad as the dude in the NHL, but I can understand how it happens a bit easier now.