I was scrolling through Facebook today and somebody announced the birth of a new baby in the family. We are THRILLED to announce today’s arrival of Baby X! she gushed enthusiastically. 7 lbs, 8 oz., 19 1/2 inches long.
I think it’s time to stop sharing a newborn’s weight and height. Doesn’t every single full-term baby exiting the womb weigh 7 lbs., 8 oz. and measure 19 1/2 inches long? Give or take an ounce or an inch, but that’s close enough for government work, as my grandpa used to say.
Just kidding. My grandpa never said that. My great uncle Frank, on the other hand, might very well have uttered those words. He served several terms as mayor of Ewing, New Jersey in the 1950s and ’60s, and even has a park in town named after him. Politics are literally in my blood. Pretty cool, huh?
Anyway. You get what I’m saying, right? The difference between a 7 lb. 6 oz. baby and a 7 lb. 9 oz. baby is negligible. I say only share information that is noteworthy. If your kid is born weighing 10 lbs., 3 oz., first of all, I’m terribly sorry for you. Ouch. But at least that’s out of the ordinary! Then again, I don’t condone fat shaming either, so maybe we should just stick to a more generic unit of measurement. Isn’t a newborn roughly the size of a bread box? Perfect! We are THRILLED to announce today’s arrival of Baby X! He’s bigger than a breadbox!!
Works for me. And if you want to add in some other distinguishing feature, e.g., a heart-shaped mole on the left buttocks or webbed fingers, I would not be opposed.
About once a year, Tara and I pick a new-to-us television show to binge. They’re generally popular or critically acclaimed series that we never got around to seeing when they originally aired. I know it’s hard to believe that an esteemed arbiter of pop culture taste such as I did not jump on The Sopranos bandwagon until 2020, more than two decades after it debuted, but ’tis true. Same goes for other great series like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men, and The West Wing. All great series that rival anything produced during the Golden Age of Television, even if it did take us awhile to get around to them. Hey, better late than never!
Our 2023 binge-worthy selection is The Shield. This gritty crime drama about a dirty cop named Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his experimental Strike Team task force, who took moral ambiguity to a whole new level, had been on my radar for years. It ran for seven seasons (88 episodes) starting in 2002. We started it the week after Christmas and are midway through season two, 20 or so episodes.
All I can say is, holy shit. What a wild ride. The Shield is based on the real-life Rampart scandal that involved police corruption in the LAPD in the late ’90s. It’s thrilling and heart-wrenching and difficult to watch at times…but impossible to turn away from. One of the greatest police dramas that ever aired, for sure. As much as I liked The Wire — the closest example I can think of, right down to the anti-hero you can’t help but cheer on — I feel that after the first couple of seasons, that series went off on some weird tangents and kind of sank under its own weight. I don’t know if The Shield will continue to hold up through to the end, but we are hooked and looking forward to finishing. Sometime in the spring probably, but hey, what else do we have going on?
By now it should be obvious that I am not participating in Bloganuary. You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that I’m not hijacking your blog feed this month (though I have been posting every other day as of late…what’s up with that?).
The prompts are still emailed to me every morning, and I did say I might be inspired to follow a few of them. The Jan. 6 prompt spoke to me:
Why do you write?
Oh, but do I have a choice? I write because it’s a compulsion impossible to resist. A creative outlet that cannot be denied. Writing, to me, is like breathing. If I stop, I cease to exist.
And I mean that in the best way possible.
Everybody has at least one thing they’re passionate about. With Tara, it’s gardening. My mom loves wine. My dad’s a traveler. If you happen to be good at the thing that inspires you most, congratulations: you just won the lottery. (Though I don’t think you can be bad at drinking wine. Unless you love Chardonnay.)
At the risk of sounding immodest, I consider myself a pretty good writer. Or so people tell me. I’m lucky in that words come easily to me. I think I have a pretty good knack for stringing them together, for telling stories that are entertaining (if occasionally long-winded). Humor is my crutch; I love making people laugh. And creative writing, my very favorite kind, gets me high. It’s a literal rush, one I can feel pumping through my veins when I’m in the zone. A buzzy feeling that is pure addiction.
Somehow, this whole combination seems to work. It allows me to pay the bills. To dream big. To take leaps of faith and always land in a better place.
I write because I can, and I write because I can’t not. Double negatives and all. As long as words pour forth, I’ll know that I am still here. That I exist.
In that sense, I write to live.
Am I crazy for thinking we should skip all those newborn stats? If you’ve watched The Shield, what did you think (in as non-spoiler a way as possible)? What’s your favorite binge? Why do YOU write?
Mark My Words 
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