So, Deena and I will be parents in early August. I say that with a degree of relative confidence but not absolute certainty about the date because we are not doing what some women in Deena’s prenatal yoga class are doing, which is scheduling their child’s births. “My doctor says that 37 weeks is long enough,” one woman said, “so I’ve scheduled my C-section for then.” The birthing industry has a term for this; it’s called having a “designer baby.”

Excuse me? Since when has the C-section, an incredibly invasive form of major surgery supposedly reserved for medical emergencies, become the moral equivalent of a boob job? Babies, as we’ve learned in all the reading and class-taking we’ve been doing, come out when they’re damn good and ready — assuming that everything proceeds normally. The most traumatic thing that happens to a newborn during birth is being cut off from its mother’s blood supply and being forced to breathe air, so it’s in the baby’s best interest not to come out until its lungs are fully developed. When the lungs are developed, the baby’s body releases a hormone that triggers the onset of its mother’s labor contractions. This process has been working for hundreds of thousands of years, and it compensates for the fact that not all babies are exactly the same. Who’s to say our baby’s lungs will be ready for the outside air at exactly 37 weeks? Let him decide.

Yes, it will be a “him.” We have a name pretty much picked out, but we’re keeping it top secret until the day. This is because we don’t want to take even the smallest chance that someone will go, “Hmm,” and wreck our enthusiasm. Our theory is that if we tell everyone after the fact, they’ll have no choice but to keep quiet and be happy for us. The only down side that I can see is that the baby’s very sweet and thoughtful great-grandmother won’t be able to finish embroidering the blanket she’s making for him until after he’s born. “What’s his name going to be?” she called to ask us. “And what day will he be born?”

As I hinted before, as part of the obligatory nesting instinct, we’re preparing for parenthood by reading lots of strange books and taking a childbirth course at the hospital. Between the two of us, it seems to be having an opposite effect. Deena says that the more she learns, the calmer and more in control she feels. (An exception to this was when she learned what an episiotomy is.) I, on the other hand, feel like I’m preparing for a final exam in some nightmare college course. Eight diaper changes a day? Breast feeding every two hours? What?

Gifts from our generous friends and family are beginning to pour in, and we’re lining the future nursery with many lovely boxes filled with things that all have instruction manuals. Deena thankfully took charge of assembling the first big item, the crib from Target that will convert into progressively larger beds as the child gets older. We dropped in a mattress and promptly covered it from head to toe with tinfoil in the hopes that our three cats will learn that the crib is a highly unpleasant place to be and there’s absolutely no reason why they would want to sleep on top of our child’s face like they do every morning with Deena.

Last night, we tackled the infant car seat. In hindsight, I see that it wasn’t the best time for me to do something requiring that much brain power. We’d just gotten home from our childbirth class where we watched two hours of bloody little heads popping out of women’s vaginas, and I wasn’t in the most optimal of mental places. But no matter; we were college graduates, and we could do this.

But infant car seats these days are no longer simple little affairs that snap in to your existing seat belts. They’re cocoons for astronauts. They come with 60-page instruction manuals, every page of which has red messages in biohazard-alert boxes reading, “WARNING: FAILURE TO PROPERLY ATTACH THE FOURTH INTERSPATIAL CROSS-STITCHING TO THE REVERSE BELT ANGLER SNAP WILL RESULT IN INJURY OR DEATH TO YOUR CHILD!!!!!!!!!”

The instructions are hideously complicated. The seat can be attached in one of three ways depending on your car’s belt arrangement, and can itself be configured in three different ways depending on your child’s weight and size. We thought we picked the correct chapter and were almost through all the steps — ripping out all the innumerable buckles, snaps, and pads for some reason we couldn’t fathom — before we realized we were converting the fucking thing into a booster seat for a five year-old. Trying to backtrack through the instructions proved nearly impossible, and the helpful illustrations were so unhelpful that I wondered if the writers had played a practical joke on us.

Foiled, we called it a night. Deena went to bed, and I blew off steam by killing things on the Xbox. This morning, I called the local fire department and ascertained that they’ll install the seat for us whenever we want. I think that’s what we’ll do. The car seat will probably never ever come back out of the car once it’s installed and sound-equalized and pH-balanced and whatever the hell else needs to be done, but that’ll be just fine. That’s one thing, at least, that we will gladly plan on.

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So, Deena and I finally watched the season finale of LOST last night on ABC’s website. And I know I’m committing blasphemy to the legions of LOST fans by saying this, but this just ain’t the best show on television.

I watch it for the occasional flashes of brilliance when something truly powerful happens between the characters — like when Ben’s daughter was shot, or when Kate and Sawyer finally did the dirty in the bear cage. I’m less appreciative of the Rubik’s Cube nature of the story, of it being some type of puzzle to be solved. To enjoy a puzzle, one needs faith in the creators that there eventually will be a payoff, that things will make sense, that there is a master plan. I’m not all that convinced that a master plan exists in this show, or if one does, that it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Two things particularly irk me about this show:

The first is the non-chronological nature of the storytelling. The show is loaded with flashbacks and flashforwards — this on top of a story with time travel — which interrupt the telling of the story. The story has become so confusing that they frequently have to have retrospective episodes where a narrator rehashes the events of the past season — in a more or less chronological fashion — just so you’re not as lost as the characters. The plotting of LOST looks like a train track assembled by a dyslexic meth addict.

Worse, the flashbacks are sometimes dropped in like Band-Aids whenever the writers need to give a character a motivation. For example, in Wednesday’s episode, the writers needed to explain Juliette’s inexplicable change of heart about whether to support Jack in his plan to detonate an H-bomb. So, out of nowhere, they show a flashback of her as a girl, learning that her parents are getting a divorce. Her parents said something like, “Even if you love each other, it doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be together.” This memory of hers is then used to contrive her motivation for helping Jack, because she’s suddenly decided she’s not supposed to be together with Sawyer, and she repeats that line to Sawyer.

The second thing that bugs me, as you’ve probably guessed, is the characters’ frequent and unexplained changes of motivation. In that same scene where Juliette’s support for Jack has suddenly changed, Kate’s has also — for no reason that I can tell other than that she’s going along with the pack. Why, for instance, did Ben save Locke from suicide and then suddenly turn around and strangle him? In a subsequent episode, he vaguely gave a reason for this, but it didn’t entirely make sense (nor could I have believed him if he did make sense because he’s been well established as a compulsive liar). Jack is the worst character for motivations that shift in the wind. In the early seasons, getting off the island was all he wanted, and then later he’s a drunken fool going around to his friends, yelling, “We have to go back!” — a motivation supposedly brought about just because he’s learned Locke has died. And then, once they’re back on the island, he starts telling people, “We don’t belong here!”

Well, thank God for the people at the Shocklines message board, who have insightfully theorized about some of the larger things of the show. The current theory is that Jacob and the other dude from the beginning of Wednesday’s episode are two Egyptian gods who are using the islanders as pawns in their machinations against each other. One of them apparently has the ability to shape-shift — perhaps into the Smoke Monster — which, if true, explains a lot of things in retrospect. . . . But I ask you, is it right to wait so many seasons for anything to have a shred of sense?

God, why am I watching this show?

And . . . when does the next season begin? I need to mark my calendar.

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Okay, here’s the first ramble, and this will prove to you that I’m not going to use this blog for ever more glamorous self-promotion.

My office is my cat’s toilet.

I have three litter boxes in my office: two open-air ones in the corner by the furnace, and one covered one in the opposite corner. I keep them impeccable, immaculate, and because of Deena’s pregnancy it’s been my sole responsibility all year. I scoop the litter every day, and I completely change the litter in all three boxes twice a month.

Except, we have three cats, and maybe that’s the problem. Scotch, a girl, is a 12-year-old longhair with, shall we say, a sensitive stomach. Moody is a 5-year-old shorthair who is the specimen of feline physical perfection if not necessarily the paragon of mental stability. I never would have thought a cat could be OCD until I met him. And Percy, our 2-year-old shorthair, well, Percy . . .

Percy is the Devil.

He’s also an outstanding hunter. He started with insects, then moved up to field mice, then to large bunny rabbits, and peaked out on squirrels. The progression of ever larger prey led us to nervously joke that one day he would bring us a small child. Like many wild animals, he prefers to bring his prey inside the house and down into the basement — where my office is — to eat them or let them loose. I prefer it when he eats them, because then all I have to clean up is a pile of feathers or an intact liver. When he doesn’t eat them, many hours of “fun” ensue as we chase maimed or perfectly healthy wildlife through the house. Recently, we did battle with a squirrel who lived in my office’s suspended ceiling for three days.

But the most frustrating part about Percy’s behavoir is that nearly every day he takes a tremendous shit in the middle of my floor. Sometimes, he’ll take it less than a foot away from the litter box, as if to show me who’s boss. (This is what cat owners call “thinking outside of the box.”)

What can I do, short of using a staple gun to permanently close his anus? Really. Do any of you cat lovers have a suggestion?

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Welcome to my new blog. Click here to browse my old blog on MySpace. I currently have no plans to announce news in here because I regularly do that on my homepage, although sometimes I might expound on a news item here.

This is more of a place to ramble about stuff, such as my impending entry into the world of fatherhood, about which I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say provided that newborn-induced sleep deprivation doesn’t rob me of all energy.

So . . . welcome! Feel free to leave a comment. If this is a place you’d like to monitor, please bookmark the page or subscribe to its RSS feeds via the below links.

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