Dad Is Fat Read Online Free Page B

Now everyone is looking to blogs and media outlets to find out what’s cool? If you are looking to see what everyone else is doing to try to be cool, you are probably not cool.
    As if journalists know anything about being cool. In high school, if you wanted to find out what was cool, the last people you would ask would be the kids that worked on the high school newspaper: “Hey, guys, can you tell me somewhere cool to go this weekend? You know, someplace where you guys are not going to be?” I know this is true, because I worked on the school newspaper.
    It is also ironic that in high school, the jocks were cool and the nerds were not cool. Now the nerds are the tastemakers. The nerds are rich and successful, and those jocks are dumb divorced guys with beer bellies. By the way, in high school, I also played football and, yes, I have a beer belly. Jeannie can’t divorce me. We are Catholic. Thank you, Jesus.
    So parents who want to be considered cool, give it up. Even if you put your three-year-old in a fedora, we all know you are still getting barfed on and wiping noses and butts like the rest of us. No matter how cool you try to be, we all know you are spending more time in the bathroom than the Fonz. “Ayyy!”

The Pharaoh and the Slave
    When I was growing up, I always assumed my father had six children so he could have a sufficient lawn crew. Every Saturday, my dad would have me and all my siblings out doing yard work, landscaping and what seemed like arbitrarily excavating our yard. He would say things like “Today I’d like to move this hill.” At best, it felt like torture. At worst, it felt like slavery. I remember thinking that dads were the ultimate bosses. All-powerful. In charge of everything. The father was the pharaoh, and we were the slaves building his pyramids. I had no idea at the time that I was not the slave, but actually the master. My father was the slave. Okay, maybe not the slave, but he was certainly not the master.
    Now that I am a father myself, I know that powerlessness is the defining characteristic of fatherhood. This begins with the pregnancy. Men spend their whole lives being active. We evolved as hunters. “Me get job, me get girl, me get girl pregnant.Now me shut mouth and wait for girl to tell me what to do.” As expectant fathers, we become silent spectators. Passive participants in a series of external events over which we have zero control.
    Sure, you help when you can. You rub shea butter on your partner’s belly. You eat like you are pregnant. You buy those tiny diapers that are the size of an iPhone and that will only fit the baby for three days. You eat some more. You attend those bogus birthing classes and learn support techniques that you forget the second you’re out the door, because you have to get something to eat. Really, you don’t know what you are doing or what you should be doing, so you mostly try to stay out of the way and eat. Well, that’s what I did.
    While your baby is being born, you witness the most amazing thing that will happen in your life, but you’re not physically participating. During the delivery, you feel like one of those NASA engineers sitting in front of some panel of switches and buttons watching the space shuttle take off. This is your baby, but today you are just the engineer in a short-sleeve dress shirt with a pocket protector and 1970s government-issued glasses helplessly watching the defining moment of the thing that you helped create. Doing the countdown but not launching the rocket.
    During labor, the father-to-be is always attempting to justify his presence in the room: “Hey, I’m the dad. I’m on the team. I caused this. Well, I’m in the way, so I will just stand here in the corner and take some pictures.”
    You want to be there for emotional support, yet everything you say or do ends up irritating the mother-to-be while she is inlabor. WARNING: Labor is not the time to try out new jokes on her or eat chips and guacamole