My son and I are eating lunch at Subway when a group of teenage girls comes in. I notice that in the process of pushing one another through the door, one of the girls has dropped a hat on the sidewalk. “Hey, girls,” I say. “One of you dropped a hat outside.” “Oh, that’s mine,” one of the girls says. “Thanks.” And she goes out to pick it up. “You see the way I saved those damsels in distress?” I say to the boy, who’s about the same age as the girls. “Try to learn something from that.” “Why?” he says. “Because you’ve got to take care of girls. They’re the weaker sex.” “Mom would kill you if she heard that.” He’s right about that. His mom is extremely volatile and always on high alert for slights, real or perceived. “I’m gonna tell her,” he says, nodding and taking a… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Parents
A Modern Stone Age Family
We finally caved in and got my son a new cell phone. The one he had was a very old model where you had to pull the antenna up manually. He used to say things like, “This phone must have been invented by a primitive Stone Age family. ‘Hey, Barney! Come here and look at this new communication device I invented!’” “Actually, the Flintstones were a modern Stone Age family,” I reminded him. “Then it was invented by a normal Stone Age family. Fred Flintstone probably used it as a backup to his regular phone, which was a bird, or a rock with a hole in it.” On the plus side — and this was sort of an unintentional stroke of genius on my part — he didn’t rack up a lot of minutes on the old phone because he was ashamed to be seen with it. Read more →
Father’s Day Secrets
Via PostSecret. Read more →
Father’s Day Poems
“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. [Read more . . .] “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold [Read more . . .] “In Dreams” by Kim Addonizio After eighteen years there’s no real grief left for the man who was my father. [Read more . . .] Read more →
What Makes Women Happy?
It’s not so much that [women] have to make a million choices; more that, having chosen, we are haunted by the possibility that our choices might be wrong. If we stay at home to care for our children, we worry about wasting education and dissipating talent and that no one takes us seriously. If we commit ourselves to careers, we’re tormented that our children are suffering because we’re not there to help them learn to read and we’re late for the nativity play. As a result, we frequently try to avoid choosing at all, as if it might be possible somehow to have a full-time job, and children, and a good relationship, and friends, and a tidy house, and be thin, and wear the right clothes, and eat in the right restaurants, and possibly be having a really sexy affair as well, complete with suitable underwear… the more we achieve,… Read more →
Homework Follies
My son asks for help with a homework problem in math. The main point of contention with math homework is that when he asks for help, he’d like me to just do the problem for him, while I prefer to try and steer his thinking in the right direction, even though it takes a lot longer. “This is like the problem you helped me with last night,” he says. “Let’s try not to have a one-hour conversation about it this time.” Read more →
Why I Don’t Own a Cadillac Escalade
Smush Parker of the L.A. Lakers has a custom Cadillac Escalade that says SMUSHCALADE on the tailgate where it usually says ESCALADE. I say to my son, “I wonder if I could get an Escalade with EPPSCALADE on the back.” “You can’t even afford an Escalade and still have a good financial condition,” he says. “I can’t?” “No, ’cause you ain’t representin’.” “I’m not representin’?” “No, you ain’t wheelin’ and dealin’. You sittin’ on the block while others are out gettin’ their bling.” Read more →
HW Explains the U.S. Newborn Mortality Rate
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its seventh annual State of the World’s Mothers report on newborn mortality. As usual, the U.S. takes a beating: Read more →
My Dog Sends a Bark Out to His Mom for Mother’s Day
Hi Mom! Happy Mothers Day! I can’t believe another whole year has gone by already! Seven dog years! LOL! My owners take really good care of me. They take me to the dog park here in Irvine almost every day. I am very loving, but when some dog at the park runs up on me and tries to get all dominant, I use my illegal ninja moves on him, especially if it’s a big dog, like a Great Dane. You would be proud of me! Thanks for teaching me to always stand up for myself. Miss you . . . Love, Lightning P.S. I wrote this post myself, but my owner helped me with the HTML. P.P.S. Say hi to Dad. — Lightning Read more →
Meet my New Stockbroker
I’m looking at my brokerage account on the laptop, with my son, age 12, watching over my shoulder. “I know your account number,” he says, reading it off the screen. “I’m not sure how that’s going to help you,” I say. “I can hack in and trade stocks,” he says. “‘It’s going up! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! Now it’s going down! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! It’s going down some more! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL!’ It’s a trading frenzy! . . .” Read more →
I Made a Mistake on the Hockey Jerseys
OK, I made a mistake on the hockey jerseys . . . My son’s playing on a new team this season so I had to order new jerseys for him. They asked me what name I wanted to put on the back and I don’t know why, but I gave his first name instead of his last name. It’s the only thing he talked about all weekend. “I had my first name on my jersey in second grade!” he said. (He’s in seventh now.) “Does Steve Yzerman have ‘Steve’” — he draws out the “e” sound to make it sound extra ridiculous — “on the back of his jersey? NO! ‘GOAL, NUMBER 19! STEEEEVE!’” Every time I tried to talk to him about something else, he’d look at me with a goofy blank stare on his face. “Did you understand what I just said?” I’d ask. “Does Teemu Selanne have… Read more →
Why God Builds Gated Communities
I’m looking over this flyer for a church group meeting that my son’s going to next week. It’s being held at a member’s house in a gated community, so the flyer has directions, as well as an entry code for the security gate. “Jesus wouldn’t like gated communities,” I say. “He was very welcoming to all people. This is racist. They’re trying to keep out blacks and Mexicans.” Read more →
The World of Make-Believe
I take my cell phone out of my pocket and notice that the battery’s gone dead. “Way to plan ahead,” my son says, without looking up from his GameBoy. Read more →
How Homework Gets Done at My House
My son’s reading Catherine, Called Birdy for his 7th grade Language Arts class. The book is set in medieval England and written in the form of a 14-year-old girl’s diary. “It’s got no theme, no plot, no flow, no fun, no nothing!” the boy says. “It’s gay!” I sympathize with him — it reads like a 13th century MySpace blog — but that doesn’t change the fact that he has to read it. “I refuse to read this book!” he says. “You can’t,” his mom replies. “I have a restraining order! Catherine has to stay 10 feet away from me.” And he tosses the book into the middle of the living room. I look over at my wife . . . her eyes are now closed and she’s biting on her lower lip, accompanied by a slow, dramatic intake of breath, all of which suggests that clowntime is just about… Read more →
Notes from the Asylum
My son’s on spring break and my wife — a moderately functional paranoid schizophrenic — is taking a day off to spend some time with him. Read more →
World of Warcraft
My kid’s explaining World of Warcraft to me . . . if I understand it correctly, it’s like an old-fashioned game of Capture the Flag, but with some killing. And yet as I’m watching him play it, it looks more like World of Running Pointlessly Through a Forest. There’s no warcraft, no nothing. “Dude,” he says, “that’s because I’m at Level 6. When you get to, like, Level 19, there’s more warfare.” “Maybe it should be called World of Jogging Aimlessly Through the Fields Picking Flowers Like a Girl Until You Get to Level 19,” I suggest. “You don’t pick flowers, stupid. You quest.” Read more →
Kids Say the Darnedest Things
One of my son’s friends is over and all of a sudden he says out of nowhere, to no one in particular: “Kids say the darnedest things!” “They certainly do!” I say. “I wish they’d knock that off. In fact, at the top of my list of kids who say the darndest things and should really just shut up is you.” Read more →
Talking Calumny
“I pity the fool who talks calumny about me,” my son informs me. I question his pronunciation of the word “calumny.” “I pronounced it right,” he says, “but I’m down wid it either way. I’m apathetic about it.” OK . . . call me Kreskin, but I’m predicting that a new list of vocabulary words just came out at school. Read more →
Between the Two of Us, We Know a Lot of Stuff
My boy repeats something he just heard on the Angels-Twins telecast: “The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Sensing a teaching moment, I ask him, “Do you know who Hubert H. Humphrey is?” “No,” he says. “But you do, so it’s all right.” Read more →
We Are Not Responsible
We’re having dinner at the Irvine Souplantation when my kid notices a posted sign: We Cannot be Responsible for Lost or Stolen Items. “Oh really?” he says. “What if they’re your items? Can I walk out of here with this cup? How about some plates and silverware?” “I see your point,” I say. “That soft-serve yogurt machine would look great in our kitchen . . .” Read more →