"Ferb, I Know What We're Gonna Do Today."

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit it, but one of my favorite shows on television airs on the Disney Channel.

No, it’s not one of the awful live-action shows that features terrible child actors and adult actors who are arguably even worse. (They’re obviously on kid-targeted shows for a reason; the audience can’t tell how bad they suck and, thus, why they are stuck on a horrible fucking kids’ show.)

No, this is not The Suite Life of Zach and Cody or Wizards of Waverly Place or, God forbid, Hannah Montana. I’m talking about Phineas and Ferb.



The title characters in this gem of an animated series are a pair of precocious brothers who devote their time to building and accomplishing extraordinary things. This is done, as we’re told in the theme song and opening sequence, as the young fellas try to find a good way to spend each day of the summer break from school. Among their achievements: building a roller coaster in their backyard, a portal to Mars and robots of themselves … which would, of course, allow them to accomplish even more great things.

Prolific.

Naturally, there are subplots too. After Phineas decides on each day’s mission, which always leads to the declaration that’s used as the title of this blog post, the boys notice that their pet platypus is gone. Where could he have gone? Glad you asked. You see, Perry the Platypus is actually a secret agent. While our shrewd title protagonists plot their daily adventure, Perry sneaks underground to learn of his latest assignment, which always deals with the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz, head of Doofenshmirtz Evil, Inc.

Come on, tell me this isn’t great stuff.

But what really helps make the show work is big sister Candace. She’s everything you’d expect in a teenage girl; in particular, she’s quite loud and quite unstable -- not that those qualities are necessarily reserved for only adolescent females. The character also likely brings the show some street cred with the slightly older Disney crowd since she’s voiced by Ashley Tisdale, also known as the blonde from the High School Musical franchise.

What makes Candace a great character is her desperation. She’s always out to bust her younger brothers for their daring daily antics, and she can never quite do it. Despite her efforts each day, somehow all evidence of Phineas and Ferb’s unbelievable escapades disappears just as Candace is dragging her mother into the backyard to expose it. This often happens with the inadvertent help of Perry while he’s foiling the sinister plans of Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Of course, no one else even knows that’s going on.

Further adding to Candace’s misery, and therefore adding to her overall value on the show, is her tireless pursuit of a boy. Her infatuation with Jeremy rivals only her determination to get her brothers in trouble. And as these two primary objectives overlap, Candace’s frustration, confusion and failure obviously add up to great comedy.

The writers of the show are clearly pushing the right buttons, and they even know how to pull at the pop culture heartstrings of an adult like myself. Never has it been more evident than in the episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo." It’s a clear tribute to Back to the Future Part II, one of the most underrated mainstream movies of the 1980s.

This episode finds Phineas and Ferb travelling 20 years into the future in search of a new tool that they need for their latest project, and they happen to be spotted by future Candace in the process. With the rush of painful memories of their successes and her failed attempts to stop them, future Candace decides to go back in time to make sure her brothers get busted. But much like the greed that led Marty McFly to purchase the Grey’s Sports Almanac in 2015 (Jesus Christ, that’s only five years from now), Candace’s greed to demoralize her brothers has unpleasant and unforeseen consequences.

When future Candace returns to 2029, she doesn’t find herself back in her content suburban life in Danville; instead, she finds a dreary dystopia ruled by Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Like Marty upon his return to the alternate 1985 that featured a city of Hill Valley that was essentially owned by Biff Tannen, Candace believes she’s erroneously travelled to a different time. However, the drastic societal change was in fact due to a chain of events she set off by altering the time continuum. A paradox, as Dr. Emmett Brown would point out.

Candace’s new reality is devoid of children. They’ve essentially been frozen until adulthood in an effort to curb the kind of dangerous creativity that Phineas and Ferb had exhibited 20 years earlier. Without getting into further and perhaps unnecessary detail (my wife says I’m a terrible storyteller because I drone on far too long and in far too much detail), I’ll just say that Candace has to do a little more time travelling and enlist the help of her younger brothers just to get the world back where it once was and where it now belongs.

Genius, I tell you.

I urge you to think outside the box and consider this as a new alternative on television. Like most Disney shows, who fucking knows if Phineas and Ferb truly has its own timeslot; rather it tends to just be on … a lot. You should have plenty of opportunities to check it out.

****

But what does all of this, a nearly 1000-word breakdown of an animated television series, mean in the proverbial grand scheme of things for me?

Should it be viewed as an indictment of my standards for television excellence? I can just hear my dad judgingly saying, “You’re watching a cartoon?”

Should I be seen as someone who considers things far too critically rather than simply accepting them at their superficial face value?

Maybe the answer is yes to both of those things, but what I’m truly trying to point out is that, quite simply, this is what I do. I watch quite a bit of Disney Channel and don’t necessarily watch/do much of what I want these days. It’s the resignation one must make in many cases as a married man with children.

That’s why it was so disconcerting to hear my wife recently say, in the context of me using two vacation days in late March simply to watch college basketball, “It must be nice to be Steve.”

That statement clearly implies that this Steve character has a great deal of personal freedom that everyone should be so lucky to have. I don’t know who this guy is, though, because he sure as hell isn’t me.

The Steve who I portray in real life sees just as much Disney Channel as he does college basketball these days. In fact, he’s probably watched fewer sporting events over the last couple of years than he has in the any of the last 20.

This Steve still doesn’t have a separate TV in his nice finished basement for his sports escapes. He still essentially shares one main television with at times as many as four other people, three of whom are single-digit aged.

He’s come to accept that Phineas and Ferb can be an entertaining escape, an escape that can be achieved even with his children surrounding him and enjoying it at the same time.

Yes, this Steve is me. I love my wife and love my children more than I could possibly say. But please, for the love of God, don’t for a minute think I’m living the dream of a sports fanatic. Don’t for a minute think I have the freedom to think and act independently. Those days are long gone.

I’ve come to accept that. There’s no reason to rub it in my fucking face.

In the House of the Lord

To my knowledge, there are five or six people who regularly read this blog. There’s one of them who I know certainly takes religion seriously and one who I know holds religion firmly at the bottom of his priorities. I assume everyone else falls somewhere in between, myself with a lean toward the latter.

That said, I wasn’t too thrilled about attending last night’s Ash Wednesday service at our nearby Catholic church, and I hope I’m not judged too heavily by any of those who read this. (Especially considering that some would surely argue that I’ll be ultimately judged on this and other related topics by the higher power whose congregations I’m about to criticize.)

Although my family once attended church, um, religiously, those days are long in the past. It hasn’t happened since the mid-1980s when we relocated to the Kansas City area. I’ve carried on that same lack of tradition in my adult life and have really only gone to church in recent years for baptisms, first communions and weddings.

And trust me when I say that I’m fine with that.

I’ve never really felt comfortable in churches, and I don’t see that changing. There have been times over the past 10 or 15 years when I’ve been in a church and thought, “What if I really made this a priority? How would I be feeling right now, and how would that change the way I feel everyday?” I've had no good answer to those questions; instead, I have always come to the pretty simple and reasonable conclusion that it’s just not that easy. There has to be something inside you that makes that connection, and I don’t have it.

My wife, on the other hand, apparently does. She also feels the need to make sure that connection is discovered and maintained within our children. I obviously don’t view this as a “need-to” type of thing, but that argument never gets me anywhere but the doghouse. And I already spend enough time there.

So I only briefly tried to fight it last night when I my wife spoke again of the “need” to go to church as a family for Ash Wednesday. I took a couple of swings in an attempt to deflect my apparent personal obligation to go, but I eventually decided that it would be in the best interests of all of us for me not to drag out the fight.

For this night, actually for just over an hour, I could be a Man of God. Or at least try to appear to be one.

Like I said, I simply don’t feel comfortable in a church setting. This begins even before any service has begun. As I find a seat just like everyone else, I’m sure there are many regulars who recognize that my face is foreign to the large group. Sure, there are plenty of them who are probably thinking, “Well, I haven’t seen him before. God bless him for joining us.”

Yet I can’t help but think that many others are thinking something more along the lines of the following.

1. “Why hasn’t he been here before?”

2. “Is he one of those people who only comes on Christmas, Easter and Ash Wednesday?”

3. “I wonder if he even contributes to the church.”

My answers:

1. Because I don’t want to.

2. Maybe, but even on those days it’s only if I’m forced to.

3. Absolutely not.

So this is what races through my head, this feeling of being unwelcome. Yes, it might all just in my mind, but why wouldn’t I think that? These are people who’ve seemingly made religion a high priority in their lives, whereas I haven’t. Maybe I’m wrong to think that there aren’t many like-minded folks trapped in there with me, but it’s not like I had time to take a poll of how many guys so desperately wished they were watching the Purdue-Ohio State game instead.

No, I feel relatively safe in thinking that a majority of the people with whom I shared the 7:00 hour last night are not like me. They wanted to be there, and they sure as hell would want to know why I wouldn’t want to be there.

And I feel confident in all of these thoughts even before everyone but me starts belting out lines such as “This is the time of fulfillment” and “The reign of God is at hand!”

Part of my confidence is in the fact that church right now doesn’t seem like church was back in 1985 – which was probably when I last attended it regularly – or even during many of the one-off visits I had to make throughout my adolescence and early adult years. I don’t remember so many people showing up in sweatshirts and tennis shoes. Likewise, I don’t remember any man of the cloth beginning a service with the phrase, “My personal trainer has been on my case lately …” as was the case with Father whatever-his-name-is last night.

It’s almost as if there’s an effort to make it seem more casual and therefore more comfortable. But it’s not working for me.

No, church just isn’t the place for me. My wife was very appreciative of the fact that I put forth the effort last night; she was sure, she said, that I wouldn’t have done it for anyone but her. She’s probably right.

But, with God as my witness, I’ll try my best to keep avoiding it.

Come on, Lucky Sevens!

I think it’s time for me to buy a lottery ticket.

It was once commonly understood that the “American Dream” was to have a nice job, nice house and nice family. It should also be widely accepted that this is no longer the case. Instead, more people dream of simply falling upon a large sum of money. Add me to that list too. I have a nice house, job and family, but a truly dreamy scenario would be not having to work too hard (if at all) to maintain the aforementioned nice house and family.

Yeah, greed may not be good, but it sure as hell is real.

Anyway, I don’t play the lottery very often, largely because the odds of winning are so unreal. My dad and brother used to play Powerball with each drawing, using the same numbers each time. They once won $5000, which sounds pretty nice, but how long did they play before they actually saw some windfall? (That’s a rhetorical question. I know it doesn’t matter how many times you play; you technically have the same chance each drawing regardless of how often you’ve gone to the well.)

But I think I might be in the good grace’s of God today – on Ash Wednesday, no less.

Consider this: Late last week I stopped at Wendy’s and my total was $7.77. Two days later I got in my car and found that my mileage was 77,777. Lucky fucking sevens across the board. Weird.

Then, the next two mornings I awoke at the exact same seemingly-random time, 4:42 am. There were a couple of times each night/morning when I briefly woke up to roll over, adjust the covers or pillow, etc., but the first time I looked at my phone on each of those mornings it was 4:42am.

What are the odds?

Well, consider that I slept for about seven hours each of those nights/mornings. The first was from about 1:30 – 8:30; the next was about 11:30 – 6:30. The odds of waking up at any particular moment during one of those 420-minutes spans is right around one-quarter of a percent. Now, think about how improbable it is to wake up at that exact time two mornings in a row. Try about six ten-thousandths of a percent.

Can the odds of winning the proverbial ‘big one’ be much worse? I’ll let you know after checking my tickets tonight. But I don’t think I’ll bother holding my breath.

Football Is Over. Isn't It Super?

It wasn’t long after the Super Bowl’s opening kickoff when my son Joey asked me why I have to watch football games “all day, everyday.” That’s clearly an exaggeration on his part, even on the one day when it’s possible to get completely consumed by coverage of a single game from the time you wake up. I’m not into that though. Not even three years ago when I woke up from a poor night’s sleep in anticipation of the Bears playing in Super Bowl XLI.

As freakish as I am about sports, I’m really not an all-day NFL fan. My habits are strictly dictated by my allegiances, so my fandom is entirely dependent on when the Bears play.

I rarely watch any of the weekly pre-game shows when there are 13 to 16 games to preview; my team is involved in exactly one of those each week. So if all teams/games are treated equally – which they aren’t – then over the course of a two-hour edition of NFL Countdown the Bears’ game would get an average of somewhere between five and seven minutes of coverage each week. (That’s assuming commercial interruptions account for 16 minutes per hour of programming.)

Why would I watch 80+ minutes of coverage devoted to other games with which I have no emotional involvement? Breaking fantasy football news? Like I couldn’t get that with a couple of simple clicks on my PC instead.

Which brings me back to Super Bowl Sunday. CBS had a four-hour pregame show, and that didn’t even include the “Kickoff Show” which was actually the last 30 minutes leading up to the kickoff. I understand that the NFL is believed to be the model professional sports league in our country right now (although you might need to stay closely tuned to ongoing labor negotiations for a reminder that the NFL is human), but not only are there no casual fans watching all that fluff, I have a lot of trouble believing there are many true die-hard football fans who stay glued to their TVs for hours leading up the opening kickoff.

There are only so many human interest stories that can truly be interesting. As humbling as it was to basically be a housewife at the time, concentrating most of my efforts early Sunday afternoon on laundry and cleaning duties, it was plenty more productive than sitting on my couch watching the many stories that stroked the egos of the Manning family and trumpeted the Saints as a shining light around which an entire damaged city could rally.

No thanks.

When gametime did finally arrive, I had the same lack of rooting interest as I did two Sundays ago when we all learned who’d be facing off for the Lombardi Trophy. At that point I was just happy that Brett Favre’s season – and hopefully his career – was over. I had a slight lean for the Colts, but it was less due to a liking for them and more to do with a bit of distaste for the Saints. Still, not enough of a difference to care too much.

As is often the case when I watch two teams about whom I don’t really care, I concern myself more with some of the individual players who are involved. And on Super Bowl Sunday my attention was mainly fixed on two former members of the Illinois Fighting Illini. If I can’t focus my energy on my alma mater, then what good am I?

So my primary concern was not necessarily who was the winning team, but my hope was that Pierre Thomas wouldn’t cough up the ball at a key moment and that Kelvin Hayden wouldn’t get burned deep by Drew Brees for a score. Neither of those things happened. In fact, Thomas made a very positive impact, accounting for about 100 total yards and a touchdown. Go Illini!

But now that the Super Bowl is over, we can move on from football. And for the first time, we don’t have to worry about the formality that is the Pro Bowl, the worst all-star game of all the professional sports.

The Pro Bowl being played the week before the Super Bowl is actually an absurd idea for many reasons, not the most trivial of which is that it obviously precludes the participation of any player from either conference champion. The good news about that, though, is that no one fucking cares. The Pro Bowl is a joke, and so it’s probably good to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

It should be noted, however, that the irrelevance of the game isn’t the fault of the league; it’s the nature of the sport. You can’t put these freakish athletes out on the gridiron together for an exhibition and for a moment think that it’s going to be entertaining theater. It’s just not possible. For a sport that’s built around hitting your opponents and avoiding being hit by them, you might as well just make your all-star game a skills competition. See which QB scores the highest in accuracy drills, see which kicker can drill one through the uprights from the farthest distance, and see which linebacker with a dangerous blend of speed and strength can literally knock the head off of a tackling dummy.

Let’s instead just make it a creative version of the draft combine and those lame College Football All-Star Challenges that are always on this time of year.

Actually, we probably shouldn’t do that either. Let’s just continue pretending the Pro Bowl doesn’t exist.

Back to the point, the football season is over. It’s time to think about where your team stands for the coming season and what can be done to address its weaknesses. The Bears’ 2009 season, for all intents and purposes, ended three months ago, so I’ve had plenty of time to ponder their future. Now I can do it without the distraction of other teams and their annoying success.

Fucking losers.

A Day in the Life

This morning I came really close to accidentally putting diesel fuel in my car. I'm not sure how accidental it would really have been, seeing as I had to have consciously removed that nozzle and pushed the corresponding button; but it certainly can be seen as an indicator of my mental state.

I know, everyone's busy, everyone's tired, and everyone's stressed. I won't deny that blanket statement. But we all deal with the shit differently. And any reader of this blog knows on which end of the spectrum I fall.

My stepson probably summed it up nicely in the car last night when he chuckled and said, "You're, like, complaining about a lot of things right now." That kind of comment generally doesn't go over very well either. Dominic's not-so-keen observation actually came just after I was cursing a highway access ramp for having too many fucking potholes. Seems trivial, yes, but consider that I was just then on my way home at about 7:00pm when I'd left work over two hours earlier. I had to pick up one kid in one place, one kid from another place, and then I unwisely chose to drive several miles out of the way to get some decent food for dinner. (Thanks to my brother, at least the food was free.)

I know it's the nature of being a parent, especially one who has multiple kids, to be completely devoid of free time. I honestly consider my drive to and from work each day to be about as relaxing as my life ever gets. But it's not as if I have kids who are overly active outside the house. I'm not yet at the point where my family is driving from end to end across town to get to a baseball game here and a soccer game there. This should be the time that I have some more flexibility to enjoy the child-rearing duties. But I'm not experiencing that with much consistency these days.

I certainly could have used some of that leeway last night, too, after a relatively rocky day at work. While it did have some clear peaks, there were also the corresponding valleys, the low point being when I felt the need to call two of my closest co-workers/friends “fucking assholes.” I meant it more than they seemed to think, but it still did change the tone of their chuckles at the time. My capacity for peripheral nonsense just happens to be at an all-time low. They should know that now.

When I did return home, I found that the door from the garage into our house had been erroneously locked. I don't have a key for that door on my chain, and, fuck, I don't even have a key to the front door on my chain. (I'll admit, I have no one to blame but myself for that, but that doesn't make the situation any better.) I knew there was a box with some extra keys out there, and while the two kids stood startled on the stairs with our poor dog barking on the other side of the door, I frantically had to try to find the right one. Luckily I did before too long, and I was finally able to get inside my freaking house.

It wasn't long after that, however, when one of my boys' chairs at their Lego table had an unfortunate accident. The accident was that it ended up in my hand, which is what led to its demise. The events that led to this incident are inconsequential at this point, but I knew at that moment that my night was going to get even worse. My wife was sure to notice this very quickly upon her return. And she did. If it weren't for Dominic's dad showing up to get him a few minutes thereafter, I might still be in the doghouse. But since Sal hung around for a little while and had a couple of beers, some of the tension was thankfully washed away by alcohol.

Still, the subject was revisited later with the expected hyperbole; my wife often likes to say, "Why do you have to break everything?" I clearly don't break everything, otherwise we wouldn't have anything left. I've responded with that exact line before, and it's not received well. In fact, I believe it was something very close to that that prompted the Line of the Night to be very smoothly and plainly delivered by my better half:

"I have this urge to punch you in the face right now. Right on the cheekbone, I think."

That, my friends, is what family life and love is all about. And at the end of the day, I know right where I belong.