Baby Immersion Weekend

Please welcome me back from my weekend of being immersed in baby preparatory activity. I spent Friday evening at a co-ed baby shower hosted by Glenda's co-workers. It was actually for both us and another of Glenda's co-workers who is having a baby this summer also. I had never been to a baby shower in my life, nor did I intend to ever attend one, being a card-carryin' male and all that. In fact, until Friday, I couldn't have told you what even goes on at these things; for all I knew, the women all stripped down to their underwear and slathered themselves in coconut milk and rolled around in Corn Flakes. Or at the very least, I would have guessed that they got loopy on Kahlua drinks and cooed at hunky fireman calendars. See, this just shows you how clueless most men are about the merrymaking of women, especially groups of women.

I went into this baby shower with an almost ridiculous degree of trepidation, because I somehow got the idea that there would be activities that would involve me being the center of attention and doing embarrassing things. I don't know whether I've indicated this to y'all in the past, but being the center of attention is quite possibly the most terrifying and discomfiting situation I can imagine, my own personal Vietnam. My preferred mode of operation is to lurk in the background of any situation as anonymously as possible. When the spotlight turns to me, it's total deer-in-the-headlights action, just a completely paralyzing fear. So the idea of having to participate in games with a bunch of mostly middle-aged women had me tensed up like a sphincter in a cheap Mexican restaurant.

As it turned out, the games I had to participate in really didn't involve me specifically. They were mostly the type of games you found yourself playing at birthday parties when you were in elementary school, and as long as I made sure I didn't win, I could avoid having any attention drawn to me. This exercise was followed by the opening of gifts, of which there were many. As you know, most gifts for babies are intended to be cute, so this situation was marked by a chorus of "Ooooh" followed by "That's so CUTE!" Fine. These things are indeed cute, but as a male, I can't really bring myself to ululate about how cute things are. Just not really my style of communication, you know? So all I could really do was sit there with a dopey Botox smile on my face. I was pretty blown away by peoples' generosity, but I was really wishing it was like wedding gifts, where you usually get to open them in private.

The other thing that always manifests itself in these situations is how abominally bad I am at engaging in small talk. It quickly becomes apparent in these scenarios that I have about zero in common with the average 45-year-old female teacher, so even the small talk is strained. As a result, I find myself groping desperately for something to say to these people, because our lives our so opposite. It always becomes abundantly apparent how different my interests are from most peoples'. I like computer programming, Lester Bangs, Jim Goad, James Howard Kunstler and RadioZero. I like Ruins and Oblio Joes and Schlong and Mike Watt and Nels Cline and Universal Congress Of and the Swinging Neckbreakers. I like watching (but not participating in) people arguing about politics. I like driving around aimlessly by myself. I like taking photos of food at restaurants. I like walking around in old neighborhoods and alleyways. Most of these are not topics I would readily bring up to your average Middle American. And ordinarily, I would be perfectly happy at these types of functions to just sit in the corner and read a magazine or something. But you know how that goes: invariably, someone sees you sitting by yourself and feels sorry for you, assuming you feel left out, so they try to integrate you into the conversation, which is always far more awkward. So my tactic in these situations is to find a person that likes to talk a lot and just engage them and let them yammer away about the Broncos or whatever while I feign interest. What a dick I am.

The following morning I went to a class called New Dad Boot Camp at the hospital where we'll have the baby. The idea of the class is to get a bunch of rookie dads in the room with a couple of guys who had recently had babies so they could tell the rookies what to expect. Amd the new fathers bring their babies in, so there's a little hands-on action. My friend Matt and his wife are having a baby just a few weeks after us, so I was lucky enough to have Matt go with me to the class. We met up a half hour before the class and we were both pretty nervous about the class. Matt is like me in that he doesn't like being the center of attention, and we both had concocted nightmarish scenarios about the class, like we'd have to change a diaper in front of the class or something like that.

Luckily, the class was totally painless. Everyone there was as nervous as we were, apparently. Plus, contrary to my expectations, all the rookie dads in the class were totally in humble mode, perfectly willing to admit that they were pretty much clueless and terrified about the prospect of caring for a newborn. There was an almost confessional tone to the whole thing, much like an AA meeting or something. It was really quite refreshing and relaxing to have a room full of men with their guard let down a bit. It was also pretty funny to watch the four guys with babies. One guy seemed like the typical golf-obsessed doofus, kinda macho and bravado-y, but he became completely humbled when he interacted with his baby boy. So I recommend this sort of thing to any of you future dads out there.

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Also, I'm still soliciting participants for my goddamn camera project. I think there are five people in already, but I'll leave it open for enrollment for another week or so. Good spatial representation so far: Wyoming, Montana, Louisiana, Michigan.

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Ruins- Tzomborgha
(Ipecac Records, 2002)

Here's my review of it

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