It is a BEAUTIFUL Spring day here in New York, a perfect day for Spring cleaning! Please indulge me as I air out some of my non work-family related writing for you this weekend.
I’m no longer just a work-family writer. Good Men Project has given me the opportunity to branch out
One of the things I am very grateful for is the chance that the great online men’s magazine Good Men Project took on this humble unproven blogger. They have given me a forum to write about work-family issues to a wider audience, but have also pushed me to stretch my writing muscles and write on a few other topics- LOVE, HUMOR, and SPORTS.
I’d like to share some of these with you today. So with gratitude to editors Justin Cascio, Robert Duffer, Gint Aras (check out his excellent novel), Liam Day and publisher Lisa Hickey (read her incredible first-hand account of the Boston Marathon bombings, shrapnel and all), here are a few pieces.
First, Justin Cascio recently ran a series of mini-articles of 100 words or less by men about love. He was good enough to publish two of my entries:
When we started dating, Amy lived in a fifth floor walkup. I knew it was love when, after buzzing me into her building, she always came down the stairs to meet me on the landing between the second and third floors. It’s ten years later, and we’ve been meeting each other halfway ever since. When my son starts dating, I’ll tell him this story so, hopefully, he’ll never settle for less.
My inspirations for the “100 Words on Love” series at GMP
After a long day at EPCOT, we’re waiting for IllumiNations to start. My 5-year old son, Nick, was dancing to the pre-show music. Soon two girls joined him. One really liked his souvenir “light-up-spinny-thing.” The three kids had a blast. In the crush after the show, Nick was unable to say goodbye. While I’m carrying him on my shoulders back to the exit, my very overtired son starts crying, looks into his “light-up-spinny-thing” and declares “I’ll think of HER every time I see this light!!!” I realized then that someday some girl is going to break my son’s heart.
On the occasion of my 40th birthday, GMP also ran a humor piece of mine to which I think many of my age group can relate:
Me at age 20. I still have the hair (thank goodness) but so much else has changed
Then: I stayed up until 2am obsessing over my fantasy baseball team Now: I watch a few innings of the Yankees with my son before putting him to bed. Doze off during the next inning or two. Wife turns on some girly show like Project Runway or Dowtown Abbey and I get sucked in, staying up until 2am anyway. Then: Exercise meant 3 days a week at the gym, plus racquetball, volleyball and pick-up hoops Now: Exercise means parking at the far end of my work’s parking lot and making sure to use the stairs instead of the elevator Then: New Year’s Eve was an all-night party at some one-price-for-unlimited-food-and-drink cool NYC club that was so crowded you can only get two drinks all night, so loud you can’t talk to anyone, and that ended at 3am with the existential frustration of having not found a girl to hook up with. Now: New Year’s Eve is spent with my wife and in-laws at their ski cabin in New Hampshire. We all struggle to stay up long enough for the ball to drop. Then: Dinner was snarfing down a giant burrito (from Bombers on Lark Street—folks from Albany NY, you know how awesome these are!) with my roommate while sitting at tray tables and watching a Simpsons re-run that we knew by heart. Now: Dinner, which involves more than two ingredients, is something I am often in charge of preparing. I generally eat at a table in a room without a TV, and with silverware, a placemat and an actual napkin (as opposed to a ripped 1/2 of a paper towel). During dinner I actually talk to other humans: my wife and son. Then: Listened to a steady stream of 90s alt-rock like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Toad, and Cracker on CDs Now: Listen to a steady stream of 90s alt-rock like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Toad, and Cracker on satellite radio and Pandora.
Have a great weekend! I’ll be back on Monday with my analysis of Marissa Mayer’s and Yahoo’s redemption by instituting paternity leave. (I had been very critical of them a while back about their telework ban- here and here)
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