Tagged: Ph. D.
Hutt’s New
Well, it’s a whole new year according to the fairly arbitrary human construct that is a complete circle around the sun, and you know what that means–it’s the season of empty promises!
Yes, now that we’ve imagined a clean slate for ourselves, let’s renew that annual gym membership so we can visit two (maybe three!) times this calendar year, all the while feeling guilty about the money we’ve commoded… Let’s also vow we will stick to a diet consisting only of kale and almonds, until that fateful night we have to stay late at work and don’t really feel like cooking and, oh look! There’s a McDonald’s on the way home. Surely just one Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese won’t derail our progress. Not a chance!… And yes, let’s buy several books that we fully intend to dutifully page through every night instead of gaping at the tv screen—except all of the shows we’ve been following are returning from their holiday hiatus, and we can’t be the ones in the dark on the latest plot twists at work tomorrow…
Sure, it’s a dangerous time to make promises—to resolve to break the rhythm of the past year, or even many prior years. And that’s why I’m here to tell you what you can expect from Twinfamy in 2016.
You may have noticed I have not regularly been attending my own party here at this fine publication, especially in 2015. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to apologize. (See what I did there?)
The truth is that for the most part, 2015 felt like an entire year of recovery, reshaping, and even occasionally (*GASP!*) relaxing—and in the middle of all that, while I occasionally peeked my head out of my cave, for parts of it I wasn’t all that sure what this blog actually ought to even be anymore. Continue reading
Two Easters
ONE YEAR AGO…
I awoke to a pixie whisper in my ear. “Daddy!” my daughter hissed. “I fink da Easter Bunny came!”
“He did?” I yawned. “Well, I guess we’d better go wake up your brother and see what he left you. Do you want to?”
“Yes!” she hissed. “Yes, Daddy! I do!”
“Shh!” On the other side of the bed, my wife did a half-kick as she insisted, “Wait. I need five minutes. My stomach’s killing me.”
I plodded alongside my skipping daughter across our one-story rental house’s living room (past the two baskets expertly hidden by the Easter Bunny) and into my son’s room to begin the twenty-minute process of waking him from a sound sleep.
Aside from it being Easter Morning, 2014, this was pretty much business as usual–my daughter being the first one awake, my wife wanting “five more minutes,” and my son seconding his mother’s sentiments by demanding the remainder of the day to sleep, as he had already “telled me firty-seven times” to “stop talking to me. I don’t want to do nuffing!”
Sure, my world was pretty nuts, but things were also looking up. With the Twins in a school we’d grown quite fond of and my doctoral coursework in the bag, I had just taken a job I was fairly happy with–one requiring me to wear a tie and commute 45 minutes to downtown Phoenix. While I was not particularly a fan of the obscene amount of time I was spending ironing, attempting to color-coordinate shirt-tie-pants-socks-shoes combos, and coming to a complete stop on the freeway, I was very much a fan of the sudden influx of real, actual grown-ass man income I was earning after slumming it as a student worker for years.
This was also about the point when I had about 30 pages of my dissertation written, and was just starting to kick my own ass every frickin’ night once the Twins went to bed with ice-cream-and-beer-fueled “THIS!IS!SPARTA!” thesis-writing binges usually lasting until about two in the morning. Although the topic of my wife and me having more kids would occasionally come up from time to time, it was primarily as a ridiculously funny joke, as several medical professionals had deemed our reproductive organs to be barren wastelands of fossilized sperm with no tails and one of those egg cartons everyone leaves on the grocery store shelf because it got dropped by that guy who wasn’t paying attention while he was checking the expiration date because he was obnoxiously talking on his cell phone about his entire life story for everyone in the store to hear. These, of course, are highly technical medical terms.
The Tap-Dancing Butt Crack
The warm water ran down my back, washing away 36 hours of sweat and grime. I systematically defunkified each of my body’s nether regions with my extremely manly loofah and inhaled the warm, misty scent of my 2-in-1 shampoo.
It was beautiful.
You should have been there. (But it’s probably for the best that you weren’t, because I was naked and that would have been awkward for you, due to the devastatingly chiseled one-pack bulging from my abs.)
As a parent of twins, I’ve grown to truly appreciate the quiet, reflective alone time a shower buys me, and twelve days into being a parent of three, I was absolutely loving the opportunity to finally hear myself think for five freaking seconds.
As you can probably imagine, adding a newborn to the mix has turned the Pseudonymous household into even more of a zoo than it already was. My wife and I settled on fielding the incessant requests for Lego-building assistance and “another snack after diss one” from the Twins as our “new normal” about a year ago, but we’ve added some new floors to our funhouse with Baby Number Three. On top of our typical twinherding duties, my wife (who is also monumentally wiped out from breastfeeding) and I now also spend our days attempting to get our new addition on a suitable feeding/sleeping/not crying schedule–all the while shushing the Twins like two shaven Grinches as they excitedly play with their noisy new Christmas toys two inches from their slumbering sister.
(Artist’s Rendering)
Our meals consist of shoving granola bars and fast food into our faces the moment the opportunity arises, and while we fully intend to shower daily, it doesn’t always pan out.
Now, as I’m sure many parents will agree with, none of this is all that difficult when you’re well-rested, but when you have a newborn, the concept of “well-rested” becomes your own personal Everest. I think my wife’s Ob-Gyn at the hospital put it best as we were getting discharged: “I’m sure you guys already know what you’re in for, but sleep deprivation is literally used to torture prisoners. Sleep when you can, and get all the help you can to make that happen.”
And we have had help–both my family and my wife’s have kicked SO much ass. But still, at some point, our help has to go home…
Thrinfamy: A Birth Announcement
Teenie Tiny Pseudonymous was born atop the Stratosphere, Las Vegas at 8:41 pm on Wednesday, December 17, 2014. She was delivered by an elite team of board certified Cirque du Soleil performers who–in collaboration with Mrs. Pseudonymous’s well-orchestrated pushing–perfectly timed the delivery with the opening Ringo Starr drum solo of The Beatles’ “LOVE” show. Then, just as Teenie’s head emerged from her mother’s hoo-hoo, an electromagnetic pulse was inexplicably unleashed, triggering all slot machines within a five-mile radius to display three consecutive bow-wearing stick figures and completely empty themselves of coins, much to the delight of cheap, low-stakes patrons (and to the disappointment of “the house,” who apparently does not always win after all). Via a system of pulleys and bicycles, the Soleil performers then counterbalanced the infant with an elephant, a grand piano, and a pint of Guinness, and after consulting Siri, declared the infant to weigh in at .0032885 metric tons (all, of course, to the tune of The Beatles’ “Carry That Weight”).
There’s a Doctor in the House
After four years of non-stop nerdery (which predates both the Twins and this fine publication), I finally defended my dissertation on Friday. I know I left you in terrible suspense all weekend by withholding the results, but I’m ready to break the silence. Are you ready?
Well, guess what? I DID IT!
If you so choose, you can now call me Dr. Pseudonymous. John Pseudonymous, PhD will also work. I will also respond to “Doctor,” “Doc,” and “Hey, you with the diploma!”
To commemorate this momentous occasion, I thought I’d remind you how excellently I’ve chronicled this journey and thus, from beginning to end, here are some of my favorite PhD-flavored Twincidents, for your re-reading pleasure. If you don’t read them now, they may disappear into the Disney Vault forever, as after acquiring Star Wars, a Disney-Twinfamy merger seems to be the most logical progression.
Twinfamy 