Sunday, March 28, 2004

How not to play with your kids Two weeks ago:  I thought I'd be a good dad and skip the workout so I could go in the kids gym at the Y and play with my kids.  Quotidian bad judgement found me trying a move that I saw once performed by a professional Chinese acrobats.  I told Maggie to bend over, reach her hands between her legs past her ankles.  With several parents and YMCA employees as witnesses, I grabbed her hands and tugged, expecting to pull off a marvelous flip and land her on her feet.  Instead, I ended up causing her to do an accelerated face plant into the thin exercise mat.  That precipitated a two hour crying jag in which she could not use her right arm.  The crying subsided after some children's ibuprofen and after Maggie learned to dress herself with one hand, we forgot about it until last weekend when my mother-in-law showed up.   "Who fractured Maggie's clavicle?", she asked upon examining her.  I got to do a rendition of the scene, and even bent over into the pose that Maggie was in, hoping Carol wouldn't grab my hands and pull to see if she could at least do some soft tissue damage. She really wasn't mad at all.  In fact, she is in a very accepting phase of her life right now, having just survived cancer.  Besides, a fractured clavicle is very common for kids and her own son had one when he was 4.  The treatment is that the kid wears a sling for the first 24 hours and gets some ibuprofen.  Since we missed the time for the sling by about 2 weeks, there was no treatment at all for us.  As long as you don't pull the same crap again, it heals by itself.  It leaves a bump on the collar bone for a long while.  If the kid's arm feels numb or tingly, all bets are off, however.   9:06:44 PM    comment []

rageboy is pure inspiration 6:56:51 PM    comment []

Commodification of Irreverence One of the reasons zen buddhism is no longer a full contact sport is that our culture has commodified irreverence.  Irreverence is packaged and crammed down our throats every night.  So, those who turn to buddhism or any other alternative, seeking refuge from the dominant culture are probably going to want it solemn and dour and without all the cackling laughter.  The minute something in our culture gets held up as an object of seriousness and piousness, it is immediately ridiculed.  We are really good at that and I celebrate it every day.  One example that comes to mind is the tourist guy on the world trade center.  I had a few days to take in the tragedy and then I was laughing myself silly at this.  So what do you do if you are looking for an alternative but the media has packaged the alternatives,  when you scream the word "NOW" but find out it's just a CD that you can buy?  You sit and find a quiet center and let the 10,000 things come to you instead of rushing out to meet them.  7:08:38 AM    comment []