After the race another dear friend of mine asked me how it went. When I explained that I ran faster than I thought, she quipped that she would set a personal speed record just getting “the heck out” of her old high school. I have to admit, I understood the feeling. No matter where you were on the popularity spectrum, high school is painful. I think that is where most of us really learn to build walls, to varying degrees of height and depth. The walls are a survival mechanism for the countless intended and unintended hurts we all give to one another. But sometimes I wonder if those walls do more harm than good. Do we make ourselves into the proverbial bubble boy. When we do let things/people through, are we that much more raw/fresh/immune comprised….

I say high school is when we learn to build the walls but in truth it goes back much further. Partly for me, high school sticks out because I went to the same school from 5th trough 12th grade, so it is all kind of blurs together as one school/experience in my head. But I know it went back further. I have some clear memories of early childhood. One in particular I have never forgotten. I was 5 or 6 and some little kid wanted to play with a group of us. I don’t know why but I didn’t want him to play with us so I taunted this poor kid relentlessly until he went home crying. I never forgot the look on his face. I can also remember being on the other end of that type experience. Sadly, I am now starting to see it with my four year old; and it is HEARTBREAKING! Josh is a very social kid, and has a lot of friends, but even at 4 you start to see clicks form. There are two boys in particular in his class, who really don’t play with him, then a third who seems to go along with the other two when they are around. Josh must have told me 10 times last week how these three boys would not let him play Super Power Rangers with them on the playground at school. So my first thought was excellent, two of those boys aren’t particularly well behaved and well and I really don’t want you to know what Super Power Rangers are anyways, hence why the little TV we watch is PBS. Then I saw his hurt, and I just wanted to hold him and squeeze the pain way. But that hurt is nothing compared to what I have seen at Shul lately. There is this girl, she is a year older than Josh (he digs the older girls) so she is in kindergarten and is no longer in preschool with him, but he still sees her at Torah Tots on Shabbat, and Josh just LUV LUV LUVs her and she is just plain mean to him. He looks at her all googly eyes and tries to talk to her, and she just ignores him or worse, tells him to go away. IT IS PAINFUL. This is one of the most social, friendly and emotionally intelligent 4 year olds you will ever meet. I have no doubt Josh will do fine in life. He is everything I mentioned before, plus handsome, athletic, and has an amazing mind. I know in life he will have his heart broken and I have no doubt he will break his share of hearts, but it pains me to know the walls start forming so early in life.

So I decided on iOS Wednesday. Why iOS (Apple’s Mobile OS)?  Well I love my iPhone and my iPad and the myriad of applications and features will give me plenty of material for a weekly column, and hopefully keep my writing butt in the chair. So why Wednesday? Well I could go in to the connections between Odin’s Day (Norse God) and Mercury (Roman God). And that the astrological symbol for Wednesday is Mercury,  a fitting representation for Apple mobile Products. He was the messenger God after all. And Mercury was known for the Lyre – While the I-devices aren’t musical instruments per se, music does come forth from them and they are capable of functioning in that capacity; there is an app for that…  But alas that pretty much popped into my head after I had the idea today to start an IOS series and decided to start it tomorrow.

At some point this child’s mother, who is normally pretty nice, offered to let Joshua come down to her house. Melissa and I were both tired, Elijah was still asleep and neither of us really wanted to walk down the street or have play date. So typically nice neighbor (hence more referred to as TNN) proceeds to offer to let Joshua come down without us. We politely declined, and explained we aren’t “there” yet when it comes to play dates without us. So TNN starts pushing the point and offers several more times. I’m starting to get annoyed, because I have now said no multiple times and she has repeatedly made this offer in front of Joshua. I tell her again we aren’t ready, and she explains to me how I need to get ready, because it is coming. And how last year when her son was Joshua’s age it started.  She had a play date and the mother just dropped the kid off, and that was the start for them… In my head, I’m like “well isn’t that nice for you”, what I verbalized was, “I’m just  not comfortable with that right now”.

Her response. “Well, YOU don’t have to be” with a quick look to Melissa. As I said, I was already annoyed, so I snapped back with – yeah I do, Melissa and I are equal partners and make parenting decisions together. To be fair unlike last week’s post I’m not entirely sure that it had to do with gender. It could simply be that TNN knows Melissa is the one home with the boys. But even still it is pretty ridiculous to disregard a parent like that. It is also possible that she didn’t mean it like that. Melissa, who admits she wasn’t paying attention at that point, thought, she was just saying, you don’t have to be right now…when you are ready… But she didn’t catch the emphasis on YOU, nor did she notice the glance to her as she was emphasizing the word.

But I call bullshit, here is why. She didn’t stop there. She tells her kid it is time to go home (the little one in the stroller is done) and that she will make him a smoothy. She then tells Joshua that he can have a smoothy if he comes over to her house. Melissa turns to her and says that she is too lazy and tired to walk down the street right now. TNN’s response – Thats OK, Joshua can come over by himself. I’m fuming; I have said no, I have explained I’m not comfortable with it, and she repeatedly offers, not just to us, but to Joshua. So now not only do I have to tell her no for the umpteenth time, I have to tell Joshua as well. Melissa politely decline.

Again, maybe this isn’t about gender. Maybe she was just assuming it was entirely Melissa’s decision since she is the one home with the kids, so my comfort isn’t relevant. Maybe she was just disregarding me because she thinks I’m being overprotective.  I probably am. I am sure due in no small part to the fact as a child there were times in my life I felt unprotected, my default is to error on the side of overprotection. Bottom line, if you feel I am being an overprotective parent, OK, raise your kids the way you want, don’t tell me how to raise mine. If I say I don’t want my kid doing something, multiple times, don’t turn to my wife and ask if it is OK, and certainly don’t make the offer to my 3 year old.

I love Key West.

Clearly whoever was looking for my FB page knew enough about me to add my middle initial and hometown, yet they were not already a Facebook “Friend”. This eliminates a large percentage of people I know, personally at any rate. I don’t have any current coworkers, not for any particular reason, there are no embarrassing photos or status updates, I guess being in HR I tend error on the side of maintaining professional boundaries. I suppose it could be a Twitter “follower”, but I have not exactly been particularly active as of late. I’m also surprised that they googled it versus searched from within Facebook, although it is possible they don’t have a Facebook profile – I do actually know a couple people not on FB.

I am not sure why this caught my interest other than I find it fascinating and surprising when anyone actually looks for me. Though I am the consummate Leo (for the record I do not put any stock in Astrology, just using it here as a shortcut description of my personality) and I am drawn to center stage, I’m not always conformable being there. Yet I keep tweeting, blogging and facebooking and I occasionally read my site logs to see what my visitors are reading and what brought them here. So maybe I doth protest to much, or maybe like everyone else I am slightly messy and have conflicting personalty traits.

Are you ever surprised to find out someone has googled you? Or if you have a small/smallish blog, do you look at your site stats.

I decided to not work through lunch today. I took some time to read some blogs and write this post. One of the blogs I read belongs to my friend Jodi. Her current (at least at the time of this draft – she is a far more prolific writer then I) blog post has a picture of her little boy when he was an infant. Her next post down shows him just the other day. The difference was startlingly. I haven’t asked her, but I would be shocked if she said that time has done anything but flown by. After I read her post, I browsed though some of my favorite pictures of the kids on my iPhone. I can’t believe how much Josh has changed over the course of his 2 1/2 years and Elijah over his 7 months. Every day I come home from work to find one or both of them have learned some new thing or have done something for the very first time.

I enjoy my job; I work for a good company and the reality is I can’t be there the way I would like. But I do feel like a missing so much. It makes these milestones bittersweet, but I supposed that is the taste of life.

1. Someday I will finish and publish a novel.

2. I have finished many shorts stories over the years and have never attempted to have any of them published.

3. I have an irrational fear of birds.

4. That said very few things in this world truly frighten me. I have driven a buck twenty bumper to bumper on a tortuous road, gone bungee jumping, cliff diving, skydiving and countless other youthful indiscretions.

5. And that said I have been terrified on a couple of occasions. The first was a month before Josh was born and we were driving to Holly Cross to do a tour of the maternity ward. We were stopped in traffic on 495 near magical kingdom AKA the Mormon Temple. Melissa stated screaming as a SVU plowed into us at highway speeds. The accident put her into early labor and it was hours before they were able to stop the labor and give us any assurance that she and the baby would be OK. The second time in recent memory was when I held my son for the first time.

6. Even though I am pro-science and highly critical of religious dogma, I am surprisingly religious. I have never doubted in G-d, only humanity’s ability to understand.

7. Most of my life I preferred to read what Academics call literature and now I prefer speculative fiction. I can even admit to truly loving some urban/dark fantasy that could just as easily be housed in the romance isle.

8. I am a terrible insomniac and Lunesta has changed my life.

9. I have been contemplating giving up meat on moral grounds but am not sure I have the will power to make it happen.

10. I’m a Mac, and a PC and a LINUX

11. As a kid I used to take things apart to to figure out how they worked, I still do.

12. I used to build PCs before it was considered easy.

12. I am very mechanically inclined but have never changed my own oil, mostly because I don’t like getting dirty.

13. I love to garden. I know that sounds contradictory but I don’t mind dirt dirt. It is the greasy and/or sticky things I don’t love.

14. I have studied Christianity more in depth than Judaism.

15. I hated being Jewish as a child but happily identify with Judaism as an adult.

16. My favorite game is Gin provided I am playing with my wife. She is a knocker!

17. My mind works best when I am multitasking.

18. I can listen to an audio book or watch TV while reading and follow both. I know this makes me a little odd but I was a multitasker before modern communication necessitated it.

19. My wife never ceases to amaze me.

20. On any given day Lifeguarding was my favorite job. Bar-tending was the most fun, and Teaching the most rewarding.

21. Even though I don’t LOVE it I am very good at HR an assume I will keep doing it forever unless I do #1 more than once and really really really well.

22. I am terrible with names.

23. Having a child (soon to be children) has changed my life in unbelievable and indescribable ways.

24. Yes I do get asked about the other Corey Feldman all to often and how funny is it that my best friend’s name is Tony Orlando.

25. Most of my life I have shared easily but with few. With Social media (blogging, facebook, twitter) I now share with many but no longer with ease.

I would also like to wish a happy mothers day to all the wonderful mothers in my life. 

My good friend Deanna Hoak, shares her views on motherhood.  Deanna is a talented copyeditor and mother, please check out her post and site.