Where There's A Will, There's A Wee-Wee

The Jaybird wore a green, long-sleeved shirt to daycare on Tuesday. It was cold outside, so long sleeves were called for.

Sometime between the morning dropoff and afternoon nap, he decided he no longer wanted to wear that particular shirt. He informed Miss Betty of that fact. In no uncertain terms, the green shirt had to go. He pointed out, very reasonably, he thought, that Mommy and Daddy had brought a change of clothes that morning and it sat there in his cubby, waiting to be worn.

Miss Betty, very reasonably, she thought, pointed out that the reason Mommy and Daddy brought in a change of clothes was that on Monday, when he was lumped in with the older kids for nap time, the Jaybird had a little ... accident while he slept, and had to wear the way-too-big "house" clothes provided by the school for the rest of the day.

Now, I can almost envision the little wheels spinning in his little mind after Miss Betty's refusal:

Hmm.
I want to change my clothes, but they won't let me.
I got to change yesterday because I went pee-pee on my clothes.
What do I need to do to get my way and change out of this horrible, hand-me-down, too-stupid-for-words green shirt?
Oh. I know!

I'm not sure at what point Miss Betty noticed the wet stain spreading across the Jaybird's pants and shirt. I can only imagine her horror when she realized that the Jaybird had wet himself -- on purpose -- in order to force the much-desired change of clothes. I am sure that she was not at all pleased about the turn of events, and neither were the Jaybird's Mommy and Daddy when we found out that afternoon.

Still ... you have to hand it to the kid. He knew what he wanted, and Miss Betty inadvertantly gave him the means to reach that goal.

There's no way she could have perceived the depths of depravity I evidently have bred into my first-born son. It's not on Miss Betty, by any means. She's used to dealing with normal kids. Kids who actually try NOT to wet themselves.

At least now we know what we're up against. I don't even want to think about what he'll do the first time we refuse his desperate plea for a puppy, or a car of his own, or a mohawk. Or a tattoo. Or a sword.

Santaphobia Rears Its Ugly Head

We want to think our kids will be different. You know, perfect little angels. Inquisitive, appreciative, calm when other kids go nuts. We are, of course, kidding ourselves.

Take my kids, for example. (No, really. Please. Take them! At least for the afternoon, so I can decompress.) Just don't take them to Disney World. Or to visit Santa Claus.

OK, I know. A 4-year-old and an 18-month-old are going to act like ... well, a 4-year-old and an 18-month-old. Knowing that doesn't make it any less exasperating.

The 4-year-old was a 3-year-old on Monday. Tuesday, his birthday, we took him to the Magic Kingdom. You know, the Happiest Place on Earth?

Ugh.

He rode the Indy cars and the merry-go-round. No Peter Pan. No Small World. No Goofy's airplane roller coaster. No Pirates. No Haunted Mansion. No Dumbo ride. No teacups.

He watched Country Bears Jamboree (after I threw him across my shoulders and carried him in, kicking and screaming), the Tiki birds and a couple of parades. That was it. Did I mention that lunch at the Happiest Place on Earth was the Saddest Meal on Earth? He did not -- DID NOT -- want the chicken nuggets and fries. He ate a couple of sliced up grapes and an oatmeal cookie.

He settled down, though, and once we decided not to abort the mission and just take in the day on his terms, it was a very nice day. He loved the cupcake, so we had that going for us.

Then, today, Santa Claus came to town. The daycare center brought him in for photos. Every other kid in the place jumped on Santa's lap and generally had a jolly good time with the old elf. Not mine.

The 4-year-old refused -- REFUSED -- to sit on Santa's lap for a picture. The 18-month-old took one look at that red costume, that shaggy beard and those awful, nightmarish white gloves and began to bawl.

Sigh.

Other parents and the daycare director tried to comfort me by saying a lot of kids act like that around Santa. It's a form of separation anxiety. Or maybe they just don't like the look of that dude in the red suit. Evidently, there's something shady about that beard, those glasses and that just-too-happy-to-be-for-real countenance.

I didn't see any other kids acting like that, though. Ah, well.

At least now when they're in therapy after college they'll be able to pinpoint the traumatic moment that made their childhoods such a misery.

Happy birthday. Merry Christmas.

Sigh.

Should Crime Dog Take A Bite Out Of Hall?

The Hall of Fame ballot came in the mail today. This is my second time voting, my second year with the privilege of helping to choose which baseball greats are enshrined at Cooperstown.


I'll never forget the thrill of receiving my first ballot in the mail last year. I've been waiting for this year's since Dec. 1. It was post-marked Nov. 30 out of Long Island, so I'm not sure what took it so long to get here. But it's here now. Let's take a look at the candidates (the guys I voted for last year have an asterisk; I also voted for Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice, but they're not on this year's ballot because they got in; and I voted for Tommy John, but it was his final year of eligibility).


2B Roberto Alomar
P Kevin Appier
OF/DH Harold Baines
P Bert Blyleven*
OF Ellis Burks
OF Andre Dawson
1B Andres Galarraga
P Pat Hentgen
P Mike Jackson
1B Eric Karros
OF Ray Lankford
SS Barry Larkin
DH Edgar Martinez
1B Don Mattingly
1B Fred McGriff
1B Mark McGwire
P Jack Morris
OF Dale Murphy*
OF Dave Parker
OF Tim Raines
P Shane Reynolds
1B/DH David Segui
P Lee Smith*
SS Alan Trammell
3B Robin Ventura
C Todd Zeile

I'll definitely vote for the players I checked last year, and I will not vote for the players who received the required five percent for carryover but did not receive my vote. That means no McGwire, no Morris, no Raines, no Trammell, no Parker, no Mattingly, no Dawson.

That eliminates a good portion of the ballot. I can also say right now that these are the only players I'm considering to join Blyleven, Murphy and Smith on my ballot: Alomar, Larkin, Martinez and McGriff.

I'm not one of those who believe in the concept of "good enough for the Hall, but not great enough to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer." Either a player is a Hall of Famer or he's not. Once I've eliminated that player from consideration, almost nothing will change my mind in subsequent years (assuming I still have a vote next year; the BBWAA membership is a precious thing, and even those of us who've been in it long enough to vote for the HoF aren't guaranteed anything if we're not affiliated with a newspaper or a Web site. So ... anyone out there hiring? No? Didn't think so.) I say almost nothing will change my mind, because if anyone ever proves without a shadow of a doubt that McGwire did not use performance-enhancing drugs during his career, his candidacy will deserve serious consideration. Now, do I have hard evidence that McGwire used steroids or anything else to crack the top eight all-time in homers? That he cheated when he became the first to hit 70 home runs in 1998? Nope. But the guidelines we're given for Hall of Fame voting are important to remember.

What are the guidelines? I am allowed to vote for up to 10 players. I don't have to vote for any. As I did last year, I'll just show you in its entirety my favorite rule for election, Rule No. 5: Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

Rule No. 5 means I will not vote for anyone who can't sit before a Congressional hearing and say, unequivocally, that he did not use steroids. (Or for anyone who can't sit before a Congressional hearing and say, honestly, that he did not use steroids. I'm looking at you, Rafael Palmeiro. But you're next year's problem.)

I'll probably send my ballot by fax to secretary-treasurer Jack O'Connell of the BBWAA the final week of December. Meanwhile, I'll review the records of my viable candidates, making liberal use of my favorite Web site for answers to all things MLB: baseball-reference.com.

The candidate I know best, of course, is McGriff. I saw him play nearly every day during the twilight of his career with the Devil Rays. I saw his last home run, No. 493, lifted high down the right-field line at Petco Park and into the little group of seats that juts out into short right, the homer that tied him for 26th all-time with Lou Gehrig. The Crime Dog and the Iron Horse have the most home runs of anyone short of the formerly magic 500 plateau.

Fred McGriff hit exactly the same number of major-league home runs as Lou Gehrig. That's a powerful sentence. A powerful argument.

Of course, home runs are not the only measuring stick. I'll take it all into account: fielding, hitting, character, sportsmanship, etc.

I'll take a gander at the high-brow statistics concocted by the high-brow, smarter-than-me guys who worship at the Church of Bill James.

I'll also listen to anyone who cares to weigh in. So, this is your chance to participate in one of the most hallowed responsibilities a sportswriter can earn. Let me know what you think.

Guidelines For Living Well: Advice For My Sons

I've begun to compile a list of guidelines to help Jay and Chris navigate life as they grow older. Obviously, it's too soon for them to grasp most of these. But they are the things I've learned about how to live well and be a good person, and I *try* to demonstrate these qualities and make my own life an example for my sons. Key word: try. I don't always succeed, which is why one of the guidelines is to allow yourself only one major regret in life.

Many of these should be familiar. I'm not religious, per se, but religious texts are great sources of moral platitudes. So, a couple of commandments and the Golden Rule are here. One of them I ripped off verbatim from Joseph Campbell: Follow your bliss. Most of these I just picked up over the course of 40 years. I take credit for inventing none of them. I merely observed what seemed to work or what made sense over the years and wrote it down. This is by no means a comprehensive list. Eventually, I'd like to amplify each of these guidelines by listing examples of each behavior and reasons why they are important. For now, I'd like to flesh out the list by calling on others to add to it. So, I welcome any and all additions.

The List (in no particular order):

1. Be honest with yourself.
2. Treat others the way you want to be treated.
3. Tell the truth.
4. Control your response to your emotions.
5. Act out of compassion.
6. Do everything you do as well as you can.
7. Attend to your own physical and mental health.
8. Allow yourself only one major regret in life.
9. Make a smile your default facial expression.
10. Observe carefully and actively with all your physical senses: Listen, look, touch, smell, taste.
11. Look for and appreciate the humor in everything.
12. Give your love carefully, but give it fully.
13. If a hand is good enough to play, raise; if not, fold. Never merely call. (It's OK to check sometimes, though.)
14. Read.
15. Say what you mean, but know your reason for saying it; remember that words are powerful and can carry powerful consequences.
16. Listen to criticism, learn from it; never let it discourage you.
17. Some people will never like you, no matter what you do.
18. Know your strengths and cultivate them.
19. Know your responsibilities and live up to them.
20. Embrace your imagination.
21. Embrace your curiosity.
22. Make a plan and stick to it, but make sure the plan is flexible.
23. Know who you are.
24. Like who you are.
25. Never stop learning.
26. Follow your bliss.
27. When negotiating with an adversary, find out what the adversary wants and determine whether you can provide it. Knowing this will allow you to negotiate from strength.
28. Be willing to compromise, but make sure it's worth it.
29. Learn from everyone you encounter.
30. Have fun.
31. Be kind to animals.
32. Follow instructions.
33. Respect those in authority, especially your parents.
34. Be confident, but don't mistake hubris for confidence.
35. When traveling, determine how long it will take to get where you're going and add a half-hour to account for potential delays.

Everything That Rises Must Converge

I love Lost. Can't help it. Only one other show, ever, has captured my imagination like this, and that was Northern Exposure. So now, it's Lost. I avoided it for four-plus years, but my neighbor Curt loaned me the first four seasons on DVD and I watched it all in about three days. Not sure whether to thank Curt or curse him. Considering the complicated nature of the show, maybe both courses of action are appropriate.

So, thank you, Curt. And curse you!

I got hooked early because of the literary allusions and direct references to things that interest me. Early on, I liked the idea that Sawyer, the resident con man, was a big reader. And when the first book he read on the show was Watership Down -- one of the books that shaped my literary ambitions as a child -- I was absolutely geeked.

It's been like that throughout, actually. They'll sneak in a subtle reference to a literary work or music and it makes the geek in me glow. This season, Daniel Faraday, the resident mad physicist, played Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu as a kid in a flashback. His mom told him to knock it off, because he was destined to use his mind in other pursuits (like manipulating the space-time continuum). Still, there was my favorite composer, Chopin, smack dab in the middle of my favorite show. Someone on a fan site noticed that the song itself, as played by the young Faraday, picked up at the 1:08 mark. It actually is the beginning of the prettiest segment of the song, my favorite part of the song. Anyone who's watched the show knows the significance of that number (1:08). There is no way it's coincidence that the scene began with Faraday playing the song at that instant, and that's one of the reasons I love this show.

Like most of the geeks who've been sucked into this show's vortex of mind-numbing mystery, I have theories. I'm not going to write them here, though. Instead (and this part will be of interest only to those who watch the show), I'll point out what I thought was a huge clue from the season finale.

It occurred as Jacob sat on a park bench in the "real world" off the island, waiting for (the real) John Locke to be pushed out of an eighth-story window by his father. Before we see Locke's body plunge to Earth in the background, Jacob (a moving force -- for good? for evil? -- on the island) is reading Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. The title itself is a pretty big clue, coming as it did from the work of this guy, who basically believed that human existence is a collective striving to cast off the crude, violent nature inherent to the species and "rise" to "converge" into a single, higher level of existence. OK, I found that on a fan site, but as big a geek as I am about these things I had never heard of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin before Wednesday. (And oh, can it be coincidence that one of the main Dharma characters, Dr. Chang, is named Pierre?)

So, the good vs. evil dynamic being played out on the island is actually about Jacob's belief that, despite the apparent brutal nature of human beings, it is possible to ascend to a higher form collectively -- eventually.

Now, what about O'Connor's book? I happen to own it, and when I went back to read the title story, I noticed something astounding. Among the other titles in the collection are these stories: A View of the Woods; the Comforts of Home; the Lame Shall Enter First; Why Do the Heathen Rage?; Revelation; Parker's Back; Judgement (sic) Day.

Wow. It's almost as if the writers of Lost took almost every important theme they've explored for the past five years directly from the titles in O'Connor's collection.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's what this show does to you. It's actually participatory television (if your curiosity is powerful enough) and it makes you want to search deeper into the mystery.

Can't wait for Season Six. In January. Curse you, Curt. And thank you.

Countrywide To Homeowner (me): You're Out Of Luck

I just got off the phone with a "home retention" representative for Countrywide, the company that holds the 30-year fixed mortgage that my wife and I took out on our house in 2004. It was, to say the least, a frustrating conversation.

The goal of my call was to find out what, if anything, is available to help people (like my family) who have never missed a mortgage payment but whose financial circumstance has shifted so dramatically that making those payments over the coming months will become much more difficult, if not impossible.

I explained that I lost my job in July and, even though we haven't missed any payments, our income has been essentially cut in half and a once-affordable mortgage has, for the time being, become unaffordable. After I explained our circumstance, Lori the Countrywide Phone Drone (CPD) told me in clipped tones that there is no program of aid available for customers whose mortgages are current.

I then told her we're trying to make sure that the mortgage stays current, something that might be impossible with our family income slashed by more than half after my layoff eight months ago. Was there really nothing to be done? Then why do we receive almost daily emails and snail mails from Countrywide inviting us to call and find out what can be done to make the mortgage payment easier to meet? Is all of that just marketing BS and meaningless advertising?

Again, she told me I was basically out of luck.

I asked her if I would be better off, in terms of finding help from Countrywide, if we had missed a few payments. She told me there was no guarantee I would be helped if payments were missed.

Then, helpful soul that I am, I told her that it might be a good idea (and maybe even good for her career) if she were to tell her superiors at Countrywide about our story. I told her I'd be willing to bet there are millions of Countrywide customers in similar circumstances, people who were good customers but had lost their jobs and were in danger of falling behind on payments, and that many millions more were coming down the tracks with all the job loss the nation is suffering now. I told her that if Countrywide was smart, it would do something to help those customers. Otherwise, Countrywide might find itself on the figurative fiscal breadline with other failed financial institutions.

What could they do? Here's one solution:

Create a program that allows good, responsible customers who want to pay their mortgage the opportunity to pay interest only for a year. That would essentially cut the payment by one-third (leaving a substantial monthly escrow payment and whatever the interest would be). In our case, it would save us about $500 a month for a year, giving us a little more breathing room while I continue to search for work. Once the customer's situation improved, or at the end of the year-long suspension of principle payments, the mortgage payment would revert to its previous level.

I tell you what else. The CPD I spoke with could use an attitude adjustment. I was cordial and calm throughout the conversation. She had my payment record in front of her, so she knew she was talking to a responsible customer, someone who ABSOLUTELY WANTS TO DO THE RIGHT THING, but she was rude and short from start to finish. I signed off by informing her, in the pleasantest of voices, that she had been no help whatsoever.

Look, I'm not asking for a handout. I'm asking for help from a mortgage company to prevent yet another mortgage from becoming a "toxic asset." I'm asking for breathing room while my family adjusts to its new financial situation. I'm asking for time to find a job, at which point we'll gladly pay the mortgage as it's written. I'm asking for common sense from a company with everything to lose if the millions of others in my situation suddenly can't make their payments.

I'm asking myself whether there is a solution at all, especially with people like Lori the Countrywide Phone Drone (and the mindless corporation she represents) holding the keys.

Cut The Crap, Geithner

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was as uninspiring as a pile of dead leaves and as informative as a homeowners association newsletter. I know very little about the machinations of macroeconomics, but somehow I know even less today than I knew before Geithner's disastrous "unveiling" of the Obama administration's plan for the remaining $350 billion of TARP money.

I, like Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and the rest of MSNBC's talking heads, am left feeling a bit disgruntled with our economic leaders. These are the people who are supposed to get us out of this mess? Well then, good luck to all of us.

Contrast Geithner's pathetic performance with Obama's in Fort Myers on Monday. He is a communicator of the highest order. He exudes confidence. He oozes empathy. When he walked over and kissed the homeless woman who asked, "Please help," Obama struck exactly the right emotional tone.

Very nice. Very touching. But . . .

I still have many, many questions. As an accomplished professional sports journalist who has been out of work since July, I have yet to see any real progress. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's more difficult today to get a job than it was six months ago. Six months from now, it will probably be more difficult still.

My family is quintessentially middle class. The difference between us and most? We aren't saddled with thousands of dollars of credit card debt. With help from generous relatives, we have done things the right way.

We didn't overspend on our house, and we financed it with a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. We did get a second mortgage, but we used that money to pay off both of our cars and what credit card debt we had remaining. We hardly ever use credit cards, and when we do, we pay them off as quickly as possible. We don't spend to excess, but we do pay all of our bills on time -- including the first and second mortgages.

I'm looking for work. I've found that I'm utterly unqualified for the few jobs that actually are available, and all this talk of millions of new "green" jobs seems geared toward people who already have degrees in ecology or environmental engineering. I always thought I'd be able to work at a book store or somewhere similar if things got really rough, but that option won't be there now, either. I'm trying to write fiction, but trying to make a living doing that is like trying to make a living playing the lottery, even in the best of times.

These are not the best of times.

We are the face of these times. My wife and I worked hard to build our careers. We proved ourselves competent in our work. We had a nice, steady income and a nice home in a clean, safe neighborhood. We thought we had prepared the way for our two young sons to grow up happy, healthy and with the promise of a better life than Beth and I have had. Now? Because of matters that seemed to have been beyond our control, we've had to cash in my retirement fund and hope something ... anything ... comes along for me before that money runs out.

I wish President Obama and Timothy Geithner could hear my story. Then again, would it even register? Obama has spoken glowingly of his devotion to the middle class. Well, here we are, Mr. President. Struggling to survive. Worried about the future. Still willing to do things the right way, but unsure anymore if that will be enough.

So, cut the crap, Geithner. Quit approaching your job like some wide-eyed doctoral candidate who thinks he can scrape by with vague generalities and high-sounding diction.

For God's sake, DO something.