Doug Moe's Blog, page 6

I’m WrongI am wrong all the time now. Well, maybe not ALL the...

I’m Wrong

I am wrong all the time now.  Well, maybe not ALL the time, but a lot.  According to my daughter.  

Yesterday she had school off for that wonderful holiday “Anniversary Day.”  You know, *Anniversary Day!*  Or maybe you know it as “Brooklyn-Queens Day?” No?  Well perhaps you don’t celebrate Anniversary Day where you live because it is A MADE UP HOLIDAY.  

But I digress.  Yesterday we were sitting around outside on a lovely Anniversary Day and a woman across the street was yelling.  As the woman walked down the street, she continued to yell and I told my daughter that she was “crazy.”  

My daughter said, “How do you *know* she’s crazy?”
“Well, she’s yelling to herself for no reason.”
“But I could yell to myself too and I’m not crazy.  You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” she concluded.

Look, before you start jumping all over me - I understand that “crazy” is an unkind and imprecise diagnosis.  But without getting too touchy-feely about it, “crazy” is still a useful New York City shorthand.  If I am trying to figure out whether there is immediate danger, or if someone is in distress, “crazy” works.  There’s all sorts of ways in which you have to navigate interactions with strangers in New York.  A different woman had come up to us minutes before to ask us where a pizza place was.  I could quickly tell that she was not “crazy.”  The night before a man approached me on a somewhat dimly-lit street and asked me for a dollar.  Nope.  Not crazy, just a panhandler.  It’s all quick judgment, not a thought-out process.  It’s not a diagnosis that has to hold up in court.  It’s a way of being street-smart.  I want my daughter to be good at that, be able to suss out a situation quickly so that her kind heart doesn’t get her in trouble.

I tried to explain this to my daughter.  And I guess I was trying to be “right.”  She wasn’t buying it.  She said that I was bullying.  I said that I hadn’t called the woman “crazy” to her face, so I wasn’t bullying anyone.  My daughter judged that to be “gossiping” then.  Perhaps so.  In any case, I didn’t see an opportunity to be “right” anytime soon, so I dropped it.

We’re in the beginning of the teen years, after all.  I have a feeling I am going to be “wrong” a lot.

Feeling Crabby

Lately I have been crabby and oh I don’t know why exactly, but it is maybe because of my one cat who meow meow meows outside of our bedroom door at 5am every morning like he is the boss and it is time to get up.  It’s either that or how my wife likes her snooze button and keeps hitting it like three times every morning until I am wide awake and worried about whether she will ever wake up.  It’s one of those two things or maybe it’s just that our president just said that he could pardon himself which is fucking crazy or it’s the guys working on my building outside drilling all day all the time and the constant rain or it’s the emails that I send out and don’t get a reply to as if they’re so great or it’s the crappy sandwiches that I eat at lunch to save money or that I don’t feel like doing anything or it’s maybe that I need a nap because of my cat.

"Why is Curious George always messing with ducks?"

“Why is Curious George always messing with ducks?”

- my daughter, blowing this whole thing wide open (via manvchild)

That’s How the Cooking Crumbles?

My daughter has gone down a Youtube wormhole of watching America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent and basically-anywhere’s-Got-Talent.  This is an improvement over the other terrible videos she’s been watching, except that she has discovered a terrible ear-worm of a song in Everybody’s Cooking Crumble

Now this thing is stuck in my head all the time.  HELP ME.  As my daughter helpfully explained, “This is the Pen-Pineapple Apple Pen.”

The horror, the horror

Mother’s Day Gift Recommendation: THE MOMMY SHORTS GUIDE...

please excuse my baby-face; I had to shave my hip beard for a gig.




with dirty dishes for street cred


i am good at taking pictures of pictures



Mother’s Day Gift Recommendation:  THE MOMMY SHORTS GUIDE TO REMARKABLY AVERAGE PARENTING

I’m going to take a break from relentlessly promoting my book to tell you about a different funny book:  The Mommy Shorts Guide to Remarkably Average Parenting by Ilana Wiles.  If you haven’t ordered some Mother’s Day flowers for your wife, it is TOO LATE.  You are solidly in order-from-Amazon or go-to-the-bookstore territory.  

Look, don’t argue with me:  I know your wife isn’t your mother and that your kid should be the one shopping for your wife because you taught him to appreciate the ones he loves, but did he?  No.  So get thee to a bookstore.

In my book (which I swear I am not promoting), I have a section about baby-proofing that lists dangerous items you have to secure such as your “precious collection of heavy, sharp things you keep in the living room.”  I also have a section called “Grandparents:  Weird Babysitters” (my parents did not enjoy this part, strangely) about how your child’s grandparents are like irresponsible babysitters you would never hire.  

In The Mommy Shorts Guide to Remarkably Average Parenting, Ilana combines these two in a very funny section called “Grandpa’s Baby Death Trap.”  It has some very funny pix of her dad napping while her baby readjusts his cable box near an “unbalanced wrought iron sculpture.”  Haha, this is next-level grand-parenting.

Anyway, the book is full of good stuff like this - go pick it up at your local bookstore or on Amazon.  And check out Ilana’s blog at mommyshorts.com

Mr. ToadOur daughter is having a problem with one of her...

Mr. Toad

Our daughter is having a problem with one of her teachers.  He calls on her a lot and also draws attention to her by asking “Did you get this?” in front of the class.  Knowing that she’s going to be hassled, she gets nervous, then starts to cry when she’s singled out.  Yeah, she might be a little anxious.

So.  What to do about it?  Maybe nothing?  We only have two more months of school. It’s not like the teacher is beating her or anything, she just doesn’t like him.  And so is it best to have a talk with him?  With the principal?  What would change the behavior?

Color me skeptical that anything will help.  I think we could complain and it might get worse.  

So I was trying to figure out how to help  - this guy doesn’t even really have to do anything and it puts my daughter on edge.  Is there a way to change that reaction?  She’s getting upset because she’s worried about getting upset.

There are people like this in all of our lives, right?  There’s a casting director I know that puts me on edge like this; every time I go in there, I just anticipate things going wrong.  Last time I went in, I knew this and worked on changing my reaction.  I got there, took deep breathes, tried to stay positive.  As I waited to go in, I just tried to stay present and relate to people in the room.  I didn’t want to think too much, didn’t want to project ahead to what MIGHT happen when I got in.  And in this instance, I could actually hear the actor ahead of me getting read the riot act.  Usually that would be enough to fill me with dread, send me into spiraling doubt.  But this time, for whatever reason I kept my shit together and I BOOKED THE JOB.  

Okay, I didn’t book the job.  But I did keep my shit together.  That is a victory.  I didn’t change his behavior, I changed my reaction to it.

So I told my daughter:  this guy pushes your buttons, makes you sad and angry.  But can you transform that into “makes you amused?”  Like, when he’s calling on you, can you visualize him as a toad?  A toad who accidentally burps while trying to make a serious point?  Because if you can do that, you take away his power.  

Believe it or not, I have no actual degree in this stuff.  This may be a truly stupid idea.  But I hope she tries it.  

“No homework” - my daughter

Why do I not believe this.

The Amazon Books on 34th Street in NYC has my book in the front...

The Amazon Books on 34th Street in NYC has my book in the front of the store with some great company.

“End of Discussion.”This is the phrase my mom used...

“End of Discussion.”

This is the phrase my mom used to use with me when she no longer wanted to engage in my arguing some teenage injustice.  "End of discussion.“  

I guess I’ve settled on this variation:  "I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”  I deploy this for the same reasons my mom probably did:  I’m done talking about something that I’m not going to change my mind on or that I don’t want to keep going around on.  It also means that despite me trying to be a nice guy, I’m what Dubya used to call “The Decider.”

This is one of the more exhausting parts of being a parent to a smart kid.  My smart kid can make smart arguments about why she shouldn’t have to do things she doesn’t want to, why things aren’t fair, why she is right and I am wrong.  And yet, the judgement, the final decision, is with me because I am The Decider.

Yesterday morning’s argument was a relatively easy one in some ways.  She didn’t want to go to school, she wanted to skip just this one day and also she didn’t want to go to her after school activity because they don’t even care if she comes and I was working from home, so why couldn’t she??? 

School:  ya gotta go.  I get why you don’t wanna go, but ya gotta.  And the after school thing:  because you’re supposed ta.  That’s why.  In the grand scheme of things, neither is that important, nothing is in the grand scheme, but what happens when you don’t do the things you’re supposed to?  Everything becomes a negotiation, a slippery slope, an excuse not to.  You promise something but don’t deliver, you bail, you flake, you do what’s convenient.  Sometimes you have to do things because ya gotta.  They are what they are.  Because “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Moe ‘describes the awed affection new fathers may...

“Moe ‘describes the awed affection new fathers may have for their children with relatable humor and genuine insight, offering a promising resource for the curious and the clueless.’” — The New Yorker

Buy it on Amazon or through your local indie here…