jaymuldoonstetson

Over the past year-or-so I’ve taken to asking my kids every so often to give me their rundown order of who’s the funniest person in the house, most to least. It’s a silly little thing I like to do and Erin thinks it’s sorta funny sorta ridiculous to make it a competition, but the conversations with them are great. And even though I just referred to it as a silly little thing, I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me when I am not considered at least the second funniest person in the house.

There are a few constants amongst the different lists. Everyone thinks Riley is the funniest and everyone thinks that Erin is the least funny. It is possible that in a moment of self-confidence Erin might feel that she’s third – pushing me to fourth and I can’t even start to talk about the idea of me being the least funny person in my own home; mostly because it’s just not true.

Both kids figured out early-on that I cared about where I landed on their lists because very early on they started putting Erin ahead of me and making fun of me for it. I laughed with them for my appreciation of their comedic understandings and a little bit also took offense to not being first on any list.

And I guess ultimately this is all just my way of starting to really wrap my head around the fact that I am no longer the funniest person in my house. I’ve been the funniest person in my own house probably since I was a young child. Not that I was hysterically funny back then (or now even), but for as much as my parents loved, appreciated, and encouraged humor, they were not the types to be the center of attention at home which left the spotlight free for me.

I’m 43 years old and for the first time in my life I am no longer the comedy king in my own castle. Probably haven’t been for a few years already. It seems so petty that I even care at all about it, but for whatever reason I guess I do.

I could not be more proud that my 7-year-old daughter can make me laugh as hard as anyone I know. I love how her eyes light up when I tell her that Cooper thinks she’s the funniest person in the house. I love how much she loves being funny; how much fun she has being silly. It makes my heart sing.

But let’s not forget the weird dark shadowy figure lurking back near the corner over there. He’s the moderately petulant child-like grown-up who’s having a little bit of a hard time ceding the once always-available spotlight to anyone, even his own daughter.

I guess now’s as good a time as any to talk about cannibalism. Even though I’m positive that I’ve now put myself on some sort of very exclusive and closely guarded list somewhere because I googled “Is eating human flesh bad for you”, I was willing to make that sacrifice in the name of science.

After clicking on a few articles I’ve learned that human meat is no better or worse for you than any other animal meat. The key is just don’t eat the brain. There are these things called prions that live in our brains and you get enough of those guys together and eat them, you end up dead. But the meat is just fine so the life-threatening aspect of it is off the table.

Next we have the enormous problem with procuring human flesh. Nine times out ten – probably more, acquiring meat to eat involves killing something to get the choicest cuts and that’s pretty much a non-starter for the overwhelming majority of us, thankfully.

But what happens when we are able to easily just grow meat in our own kitchens? What if you’re taking stem cells from something (without really harming it) and using that sample to grow whatever meat you want (the way they are doing in labs already)? It’s going to change the way we’ve eaten for the last one-and-a-half million years.

Forget about what it might mean for dealing with hunger and malnutrition all over the world, are you not just the least bit curious as to what a “you-burger” tastes like? And I’m not saying that I’ve ever even actually thought about it once before now, but assuming (as I now do) that this will most certainly become part of the collective zeitgeist, we should probably start the conversation early so we are better prepared for when it becomes our inevitable reality.

So if it wouldn’t be dangerous to eat or harmful to anyone to make, what else would be stopping you from grilling up some good old-fashioned people meat? I don’t expect any sort of grand shift in the variety of meat people consume, but it would certainly add a new human component to our potential daily menus. I just think it’d be really interesting to know what I taste like.

Once established, the next step will be when celebrities and the like begin making their stem-cells available to purchase so you can taste the flesh of your favorite movie star, musician, or politician. Anyone with stem cells to sell could offer them to the public, with free shipping even, for whatever price they choose.

Maybe you’d be interested in some Steak Gyllenhaal, or Ba-rack of Obama? I’m positive you’ll be able to buy some Kardashian ass-burgers if you want, but forget about the obvious calls for Kevin Bacon, because he will most certainly refrain on the grounds that it’s just too conspicuous.

The possibilities would become endless. Imagine making an actual brontosaurus burger or the equally fascinating spicy buffalo pterodactyl wings? You get where I’m going with this.

Anything we could get stem cells from could become someone’s conceivable meal, and I, at least once, will be sure to sample a little of myself. Do you really have no curiosity about that at all?

I say hang up your hang ups and get on board the “people meat” train because it’s pulling out of the station sooner than you think. Are you going to be watching from your place on the platform or will you be looking out the window waiving as you embark on the future of food?

By mid-spring of sixth grade I was already five-and-a-half years into a seven-and-a-half year almost entirely one-sided love affair with a girl named Lauren. And as the weather warmed in 1986 Bergen County, New Jersey, my abilities to publicly contain my feelings for her, after so many years of silent suffering, were beginning to erode quickly. It was really more of a crumbling rockslide.

So that night my twelve-year-old self had an idea, and before I had even formulated the complete plan I had grabbed my blue canvas covered three ring binder and a black marker and I began drawing. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes I defiled my binder, both front and back covers and across the spine. There were hearts with “J + L” all over and things like “Lauren & Jay FOREVER” and “LAUREN STETSON”. Across the spine, from one end to the other, in big block letters it said “JAY LOVES LAUREN” with a big heart next to it.

What made the plan so brilliant was – who would ever do that to his own binder? Who would do something so cringingly embarrassing simply to provide himself with plausible deniability? No one, that’s who.

So the next morning in school when it was time to take out our binders, I pulled it out and awkwardly and loudly dropped it onto my desk and waited. And after what felt like minutes but was probably more like ten seconds I turned to the kid behind me and said, “Can you believe this?” and I showed him my binder. He looked at it and started giggling at me.

“Why did you do that?” he asked, and before he even finished his sentence I was cutting him off, “No! It was someone else! Someone must’ve taken my binder and did this! And it’s the only binder I have…”

Soon kids on both sides of me began pointing and snickering with those around them and I could start to feel the warmth of my well-laid plans begin to wash over me. I kept one eye on Lauren waiting for the news to reach her while simultaneously trying to deny any knowledge of how it’d happened with those around me.

When the girl sitting behind Lauren leaned in to tell her to look back at my desk I was already looking right at her wide-eyed, shaking my head, shrugging my shoulders, palms up, mouthing, “I don’t know. I don’t know who did this…” She responded the way that any innocent twelve-year-old girl would respond. She was mortified. She spun back around in her seat and shrank into a ball with her eyes shut tight just wishing she could disappear forever. She hated me.

That afternoon when I got home from school I told my mom that I had lost my binder and needed a new one.

Cut to thirty-one years later and now it’s the other night when I went to Home Depot to buy some contractor-grade garbage bags and Clorox wipes. As I was pushing my cart through the mostly empty parking lot back to my car, I walked past an SUV that was sitting two spots away from where I was parked, and there on the back, written with a finger in the dust/dirt was a 3 inch by 3 inch swastika and an all uppercase “TRUMP”. It wasn’t very big, but it was noticeable.

My first thought was, “Oh god,” as I continued to my car, still staring at the back door of the SUV. As I put my bags and wipes into my trunk I thought about walking back over and wiping it off.

But then I thought, “What if they put that there themselves?” What if they weren’t comfortable with a bumper-sticker so a little finger scribbling on the back of their dirty car would allow them to express their excitement and support for how things are going right now but still keep some plausible deniability when confronted by an angry, unstable liberal? And then wiping off his/her car would be me putting my intolerantly liberal views on them. And what right do I have to touch someone else’s car?

I closed my trunk, did a complete circle around my car looking to see if anyone had scribbled anything onto my dusty doors, and after finding nothing, I got into my car and headed home.

So in conclusion, I saw some disturbing graffiti on someone’s car and I made the decision to leave it there because I once ruined my own 3-ring-binder in an effort to get a girl to love me.

I had a thing with Riley tonight. I was trying to get the kids to go upstairs to get ready for bed and Riley started crying about missing mommy. Erin was out so it was just them and me, and Riley sat at the bottom of the steps and howled for mommy.

“Why isn’t mommy here?… I miss mommy… I love my mommy and I miss her… And why is she never home to help put us to bed! She’s always not home… I miss mommy…”

And a less-seasoned “Riley parent” might say, “Oh my gosh. That is just heartbreaking. What a sweet little girl saying how she loves and misses her mother… What a gentle, loving, beautiful little girl.” And she is all of these things and more, but she does this every time either one of us isn’t home to put her to bed. Sometimes it’s worse than others, but pretty much any time either one of us has to put them to bed on our own, she will cry for the other one and accuse them of never being there to put her to bed. And she’s skilled at it.

Tonight I walked over and kneeled down in front of her and said, “Cutie, I know it makes you sad that mom isn’t here to put you to bed, and it’s fine to cry about it. But she’s not going to be home before you go to bed, just like it always is when she or I are out for the night, and being loud and angry about it is only going to make this a bad time for us. I love you very much…”

I stood up and I tried to give her a kiss on her head, which she recoiled from, and I went upstairs. Cooper was already in his bed watching youtube so I went and laid down on my bed. I could hear her pulling herself up the stairs crying the whole way. She crawled through the hall and into her room and when I heard her in there I got up and went in to see her. When she saw me in the doorway, staring me down, she started crying louder and so I turned around and went back to my room.

I listened to her cry for the next three or four minutes while I scrolled on my phone until I heard her leaving her room and coming out into the hall towards my room, still crying. I put my phone down and looked over to the doorway as she was crossing through it, still crying. She looked at me, sobbing, and said, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

I sprung up and reached for her, pulling her close to me, all the while she kept crying and repeating, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…” and I held her and said, “It’s okay. Thank you for the apology, and it’s okay.” After a few moments, I laid back on the bed and I pulled her up onto my stomach and we sat there for a minute and she stopped crying.

I took her hands and I held them on my heart and I looked her in the eyes as tears started filling my eyes and said, “I want to tell you something that I don’t even know if you believe, and that’s okay… I think you’re an amazing person. You are an amazing person.”

And almost as if on cue, her eyes welled up and she threw herself down onto my chest and wrapped her arms around my neck as she again started sobbing, saying, “Thank you… Thank you… Thank you…” crying as hard as she had at any point in the evening. And I held her and said, “You’re welcome…”

Out of the corner of my teary eye I could see that Cooper had stepped into the room and I motioned for him to back out, and he did – because he’s a champ – and we laid there embracing each other until she stopped crying.

When she sat up with a small smile on her face and wiped the tears off her delicious cheeks she asked, “Can we play I Love/I Hate[1]?” So we played that for a few minutes until she asked if she could go into her room and watch iPad. And just like that it was over.

Part of me wants to relish in the amazing parental accomplishment I achieved here tonight. I connected with my daughter and my daughter connected with me. Here was a moment that, quite possibly, could change her life and send her on the path of happiness and success, and I was there for it, leading the way almost. It could be a positive parenting story that I can have to tell for the rest of my life.

The other part of me is sitting here wondering if she was the one giving. What if, somehow, in that moment, she saw that she needed to be the one offering the comforting shoulder for me to cry on? What if I was the one that needed to hear the “thank you”?

[1] I Love/I Hate is a game we play where someone asks someone else, “Why do you love/hate __________ so much?” It’s an opposite game where you pick something the person feels strongly about and ask them why they feel the reverse about it. So you might ask Cooper, “Why do you love cheese so much?” and Cooper, who thinks cheese is literally poison (he won’t eat at Wendy’s anymore because he feels they tried to “poison” him by twice making him a cheeseburger instead of the hamburger he ordered) and he would respond with, “Because it’s so gooey and soft and I just love the way it feels in my mouth,” even though those are some of the things that gross him out the most about it.

When I was thirteen years old, I went to my dad who was working in his office. I walked into his room, closed the door, and asked him if I could talk to him about something. He put down his glasses, turned his chair to face me and said, “Sure.”

I took a quick breath and said, “Greg and I have been working on a stand-up comedy routine and we want to take it on the road and start performing at clubs around New Jersey and beyond. There’s a chance that I might have to miss some school, but we’d try to do it on the weekends as much as possible, so…”

He kept eye contact with me the whole time I was speaking and when he sensed that I had said all that I needed to say he cut in with, “What are you talking about?”

As I had feared, he didn’t think it was nearly as exciting an idea as Greg and I did, and I immediately shifted to the begging portion of my presentation. “No dad you don’t understand. We’ve done our routine for lots of our friends (at most it was 2 others and one of them was definitely my brother Joe) and they all think it’s really good. They really think we’re funny.”

Looking back it’s more likely that my dad was so blind-sided by his eldest son of thirteen years coming to talk to him about hittin’ the road to perform a stand-up comedy routine with his twelve year old friend, I mean, how did we even think we were going to get to these shows “around New Jersey and beyond”? I can only assume that we were so sure that we would become fast celebrities, as soon as only a few months even, and then we’d be able to have a bus or drivers who were going to take us to our sold-out performances in Pittsburgh and Boston, “and beyond”.

I interpreted his question of “what are you talking about?” as a passive aggressive “No,” and instead of calmly repeating my sales-pitch, I ruined it with my pathetic attempt to impress him with the fact that a few other twelve and thirteen year olds thought we were hysterical. It doesn’t really matter how I might’ve handled that conversation, though, because there was only ever going to be one response. “No. That’s ridiculous. Go do your homework.”

With my eyes pointed somewhere down towards the ground I uttered, “Okay,” walked to the door, opened it, and went back to my room.

When I called Greg to tell him how it went I started feeling even worse about how it all went down because as I retold the story it was painfully obvious that I had made no attempt to stand up for myself or us. Dad said, “no” and I said, “okay”.

And I support my dad’s idea that agreeing to your thirteen year old child’s wildly absurd idea of becoming a stand-up comedian, and performing at comedy clubs, and missing school for this would be a text book example of bad parenting, so I hold no grudge against him for rejecting the notion so quickly.

But for a parent who preached the importance of extra-curricular activities, whether it was sports, or chorus, or theater, whatever it was, here was a golden opportunity for him to say something like, “Wow. That’s really great. I had no idea that you were that into stand-up comedy. If you’re really serious about being a stand-up comedian we should look into signing you up for some comedy writing classes, or maybe you could do some introductory-level improv? Let’s get you taking some classes first and if it’s still something that you’re interested in we can look into what the next steps might be. I love the excitement and enthusiasm you have here. It’s really amazing to see from you.”

He could’ve said any or all of these things, but he said, “No. That’s ridiculous. Go do your homework.” And I am positive that he said it to protect me. That he was trying to steer me away from the life of a struggling comedian. Or maybe he didn’t think I was funny enough to do it. Maybe he felt like the best and most likely path to “success” was through math and business, and anything other than that was just setting myself up to suffer. Sometimes we believe that we just want what is best for our loved ones, but sometimes we are just so wrapped up in our own perspective that what we really want is what our best is for someone else.

My dad was a full-fledged life-long card-carrying “businessman”. He saw a life in the business-world as the most direct path to stability and comfort, and these things, I believe, are what he valued most, attaining stability and comfort for his family.

I know my dad loved me, and I know that he believed that he was trying to put me on the best path to success, but maybe our definitions of “success” weren’t the same and he wasn’t able to see that. I’m sure that at thirteen I didn’t recognize this either, but that’s not really the responsibility of the young teenager, it’s the parent’s task to help inspire their child to strive to become the best _____ that they want to be.

And it’s very easy for me to sit here and question my dad’s response to me that night until the day that one of my kids comes to me and says, “Dad. I want to be unicycle-riding-juggler-mime. Can you help me become the best mime the world has ever seen?”

My dad loved me as much as a father could love a son, but for my kids’ sake, I hope I can do better.

I believe that the definition of an “adequate” relationship is one where you care for and respect your partner to the same degree that they do themselves. What takes it from “adequate” to exceptional, though, is when you love and appreciate them even more than they do themselves sometimes. Because sometimes we don’t always deeply and completely love and accept ourselves, and it is in these moments of self-doubt or loathing, even, that the additional admiration from our companion is needed to help pull us out of that potential downward spiral.

And it doesn’t qualify as exceptional if only one person is behaving this way. What makes it special is when both parties are confident enough both in themselves and in their esteem for their mate that they can help remind them that they are, in fact, good enough. Good enough to be with you at the very least, right?

We all do things in our cars that we hardly ever do out in the open. We sing loud, sometimes at the top of our lungs. We scream like lunatics; sometimes on the phone and sometimes at others on the road. We bawl our eyes out. We rip big, loud farts and then hotbox in the stench for a few moments before finally opening the windows to air it out. And we pick our nose, often with abandon, hurtling down the highway at 70 miles per hour. And it’s all okay.*

We’ve all been there. Sometimes you just have to put social pleasantries and a accepted demeanor aside and just get up in there. I’m not saying it’s pleasant to look at; hell, who ever even watches themselves with their pinky up a nose hole vigorously digging around trying to nab the crusty bugger that’s causing all sorts of discomfort. But we all know what it feels like and there are few better feelings than extracting that thing and the immediate sense of relief and calmness in knowing everything will be alright again.

Sitting safely behind the cozy comfort of a few sheets of clear glass we happily yell along to our favorite song giving no fucks about the people walking by who maybe notice us and maybe they don’t. But the people sitting on the subway belting out a song like they were on stage at a concert, those people are crazy.

*Except for the yelling at other drivers part. That shit is a 100% waste of time; I don’t care what you’re going to tell me about the therapeutic benefits of releasing your pent up anger on “inconsequential” others. No. That type of behavior is a festering sore that grows like a metaphorical flesh-eating disease that ultimately turns your heart black and kills you. Cut it out.

When I was 20 years old I made the mistake of trying to fix a key chain with my teeth. I just needed to bend a metal hook back down a little bit and using my teeth to accomplish this goal seemed like a perfectly rational thing to do.

As I started to bite down there was an audible click or something and before I realized what was happening I saw a small sliver of white flip up into the air and land on the floor in front of me. I immediately recognized that I had just chipped my tooth doing just about the dumbest thing you could try doing with your teeth, you know, bending metal? And it doesn’t matter that I immediately regretted even trying it because the damage had been done. It was lying on the floor at my feet.

I bent down to pick up the sliver of bone as my tongue started darting around over my teeth searching for the chink in my proverbial armor that had been heretofore strong and unbroken.

I found the spot before I was even standing upright again. It was definitely there but it didn’t feel too bad. Inspecting the piece that had tried to get away, I matched it to what I was feeling with my tongue and was able to deduce that I had lost a piece of one of my top front teeth. It had come off in a thin sheet about the size of a small grain of rice. I stood there and checked around my other teeth and found this to be the only issue.

And while it didn’t feel as smooth as the rest of my teeth, after looking at it in the mirror, I found it to be relatively unnoticeable especially if you didn’t know something was missing. With all of the other outcomes that were possible I had made it out pretty unscathed.

Cut to 15 years later and I’m sitting in a work meeting chewing on a pen cap, as I was famous for doing, and in the middle of my manager talking I bit down on the cap and I heard and audible click or something and before I realized what was happening I saw a small white object sail up into the air and land on the table in front of us. My manager stopped what she was saying and looked at me and said, “Was that a piece of your tooth?”

I looked down at the table in front of me, picked up the small chunk of tooth with my finger, and said quite defeatedly, “Yeah…” My tongue went right for my previously compromised tooth and I felt it right away. This chip was going to be noticeable. It felt like the bottom quarter of that same tooth now had a sizable gap between it and his neighbor.

I asked to be excused for a moment while I went to assess the damage. My manager obliged, and I walked to the bathroom rolling the broken piece between my right thumb and forefinger while my left index finger gently battled with my tongue to try and feel how bad it was going to be.

I walked into the bathroom and took a deep breath as I turned towards the mirror with my top teeth sticking out exaggeratedly so I could inspect the carnage, and I saw right away that this time it was, in fact, going to be noticeable. Once again, though, I felt pretty good about the reality of what it was versus what it could’ve been.

There was now a somewhat pronounced space right smack dab in the middle of my smile. Opening my mouth to speak, laugh, or even breathe would put this small but noticeable empty spot in between my two front teeth on display. But it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t terrible.

That was 6 years ago, and I still have my messed up tooth. And for everyone that I’ve spoken to about it, both of them quite adamantly feel that I should have it repaired. Erin photo-shopped my tooth for my online profile picture, and John hasn’t stopped short of saying that it makes me look like a recovering – or possibly still current – heroin or meth user.

And I see both of their similar perspectives, but I also see my imperfect smile as some sort of badge of honor, or dishonor, really. I mean, what’s the big deal? It’s a small missing piece of tooth? Does it make me any less good of a person, or any less trust-worthy, or capable, smart, confident, etc.? No it should not.

And I recognize that this stubborn point-proving stance just has me ending up as the guy with a chipped front tooth for the rest of my life, but maybe me being comfortable with my “imperfections” might help one or both of my kids with their own self diagnosed “deficiencies” later on. Because while all have them, it’s the power that we give our “shortcomings” that determines how they affect us in our lives.

Cooper was lying on the sofa and he says, “Dad. Did you know you can do this?”, and I turned to see him using a hot dog to swipe through and select apps on the iPad.  Apple obviously sees no need to distinguish between a living person’s finger and a slightly-above-room-temperature tube steak, or they don’t have the technology to do so.

#wejustarentthereyet

When I was twenty-two almost going on twenty-three I was living in my parents’ house working as the assistant manager at a music store (cd’s, not instruments). A year earlier I had come to the realization that I wasn’t ready to go to college*, and I was spending my time actively trying to find my place. I was writing. I was discovering all sorts of new music. I was reading like crazy. It was, what I believed to be, the commencement of my journey towards my own personal renaissance.

My best friend Greg, who was one year behind me in school, calls me up one day in January and says, “You know? When I graduate we should go to Europe for, like, a month or something.”

As I hear the words coming out of his mouth my stomach is already seizing and the muscles just above my jaw start tightening. He was asking me to go travel with him across the globe (partially) for a month, and here I was, in the almost most absolutely perfect situation to be able to do it – no rent, not spending any money on food; I wasn’t even paying for my own car insurance.

“All we need is, like two thousand dollars each, and we’ll be able to go pretty much wherever we wanted for maybe a month,” he said as I did the quick math in my head – five months to get to two thousand is four hundred a month. I was making about twenty-five thousand a year back then, so even after taxes I was taking home fifteen hundred a month. With no other expenses besides cd’s, movies, gas, and restaurants, putting aside four hundred a month (or more even) wasn’t going to be a real problem.

When he finished his pitch, he was so excited and amped up that I could almost feel him coming through the phone so that he could witness my own enthusiasm for this incredible idea that he was including me in.

And I responded with, “I don’t know, Greg. I mean, anything that I can see in Europe I can see in New Jersey.”

That was my response. My best friend in the world; the person who inspired and championed my new-found creative spirit was inviting me to literally see the world with him and I responded with possibly the most dumb, and ignorant, and narrow-minded collection of words that anyone could ever say to someone.

“Anything that I can see in Europe I can see in New Jersey.” It bears repeating only in that I need to verify that a seemingly intelligent person said that to someone else with the intention of getting them “on board” with why I didn’t want to go to Europe.

It would be very easy for someone to still be embarrassed or ashamed of being the person to utter those small-minded words, but thankfully, Greg listened to me, and then immediately took me to the proverbial woodshed and demanded that I think about what I had just said. He whole-heartedly set out to convince me that A) what I had just said was unbearably moronic, and B) totally based in fear. And if I was ever going to grow and develop into the person that I wanted to be, that I needed to go to Europe with him.

And good move for me to let him talk me into it, because those three weeks across the Atlantic were worth so much more than the measly two thousand dollars that it cost to do it.

But if he hadn’t pushed me, if he had just taken my feeble response at face value, I would’ve stood by and six months later, be sitting in my room in the basement of my parents house in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey listening to him tell me all of these amazing stories about all of these amazing things that he saw in all of these amazing places.

And I would’ve missed out on all of it because the thought of being in a strange place that I didn’t know was so scary to me that I couldn’t even rationally consider whether I wanted to go or not, let alone being able to recognize the monumental opportunity and importance in just going.

* I had been in college for three and a half years already before coming to this realization.