In a comment to Wood's post below, SF blogger Llamaschool expressed an interest in a washer and dryer that plugs into a wall outlet and uses the sink as its water source. Llamaschool clearly hasn't seen our appliances. I would gladly walk down a dozen flights of stairs to reach a real washer/dryer.

When we learned Wood was pregnant, she gave me an order: "no more laundromats. Get me a washer/dryer or find me a new apartment." I pleaded with the landlord to put a proper voltage hookup in the garage and offered to leave the appliances behind after we moved out, but he refused. He suggested an in-apartment sink hookup model.

I didn't choose "Dutch" as my nom de blog because of some affinity for Ronald fucking Reagan. I am ethnically half Dutch and therefore genetically a cheap bastard. In the world of ethnic stereotypes, the Dutch make the Jews look like profligate spendthrift Irishmen. I come from a long line of intolerant tightwads. The Dutch Calvinists who settled the part of Michigan I'm from left the Netherlands because the government was granting rights to Jews and Catholics and their church had grown too liberal. They are perhaps the only immigrant community in North America who left their native land because the government there had grown too tolerant for them. And man, are they cheap.

So instead of doing the right thing, I did the Dutch thing. Instead of going to Sears or Home Depot or something, I scoured craigslist for weeks looking for a used apartment-sized washer/dyer combo for $200 or less. After several weeks of looking, I found one. We had to drive out past the foggy curtain of the outer sunset on a cold night, and when we got there, what did we find? Two sweaty Greek teenagers, one of whom talked like a used car salesman while the other made erotic hand gestures towards a washing machine like one of Barker's beauties on the Price Is Right. The salesman gave me this long-winded story about how they bought the appliances brand new and used them for a couple years but now their mother lives with them and they need bigger ones (as if to pepper the tale with evidence, a sharp mannish-voice barked something at them in Greek from upstairs). We fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, baby, wrote a check and lugged them out to my car.

I should have known it was a scam. Even though it was a Sunday night, somehow my check had already cleared the next morning. Plus, while I technically only know Ancient Greek, I swear at one point the Greeks smiled at each other, nodded towards us and mouthed the word for "suckers." Apparently, these two Greeks have quite a scam going. They pick up ancient, broke-down appliances from the sidewalks and "repair" them. The second time we washed a load, one of the agitator belts snapped. That sounds like a very knowledgeable conclusion, but at the time I was fucking clueless about how a washing machine worked. When I unscrewed the metal back from the machine, I wouldn't have been surprised if there was a little gnome on a stationary bike back there. I was that clueless. So with my traditional DIY spirit (read: cheapness), I set off on an internet journey to learn washing machine repair, or should I say, belt replacement. It was curious, because I didn't need to "replace" a belt at all. The agitators weren't connected with a solid rubber belt like they should have been. The Greeks had "repaired" the machine by using a scrunchy. Yes, they stretched a scrunchy between the knobs on the backs of the agitators and sealed the back of the machine up before they sold it to us. It took six trips to the hardware store, but eventually I was able to find a real belt. It worked fine.

A few weeks later, the dryer stopped working. Another belt problem? You betcha! When I removed the back of the dryer, I learned they had replaced the broken belt that went around the tumbler with a fucking shoelace. Six more trips back and forth to the hardware store, and I was able to repair the dryer. It still works.

Let me put this in perspective. At my job, they somehow charge the clients $285 an hour for what I do. I spent at least eight hours trying to figure out how to fix those damn machines. That's $2280 of my time. It's an interesting thing about the Dutch. We have no concept of the term "opportunity costs." A Dutchman will never do "Wash'n'fold." This is also beyond his comprehension.

During the course of my internet research, I learned that our machine models were last manufactured in 1973. That means they were at least four years older than I am. The interesting thing about these machines is that the wash and spin cycles are performed in different compartments, meaning you have to take your load out of the washing compartment, put it in the spinner, drain the washing compartment, fill it with rinse water, run a rinse cycle, then put the load in the spinner again to spin. It is a very wet process. And I just did seven loads. That's seven wash cycles, seven rinse cycles, and fourteen spin cycles. This is some Laura Ingalls Wilder shit.

And during the last few spin cycles, I could tell that the spinner motor is on its last leg. I am not fucking with that shit.

I can't wait for the day when we buy a nice house that has room and hookups for a nice new set of appliances, and I can post an ad on craigslist: "Almost new washer/dryer combo, great for small apartments." $175.

A dutchman understands depreciation value.

My Friday night plans are to take a bath and read Us Weekly. More importantly, what I am not going to do for the half an hour I'm in the tub with my trashy magazine:

• Think for one minute about our sleep problems. Junebug absolutely does NOT sleep through the night; she doesn't even come close. When people used to ask me everyone's favorite question for new mamas, I'd dodge it by saying, "we all get plenty of sleep!", but I've stopped kidding myself. I'm not getting enough sleep, and it sucks. She also doesn't come close to falling asleep on her own, something I'm gathering other babies can do and I should be trying to "teach" her. But whatever -- without entering into the cry v. coddle debate, let's just say all of this sleep stuff occupies my brain FAR MORE than it ought to, and despite taking up so much space in my head, I've come up with no solutions.
• I am not going to worry about the work I haven't been getting done. Yes, I was in the office all week, but no, I have no idea what I did there. I'm not going to think about everything that I have to do next week because today is FRIDAY! THE BEST DAY OF THE WEEK! and I have a whole weekend with my little family and SCREW WORK. It'll get done eventually.
• I'm also not going to let my mind wander past the bathroom door to the rest of the apartment where mountains of onesies covered in (a) crusty sweet potatoes, (b) slightly-different-colored regurgitated sweet potatoes, or (c) sweet-potato-colored baby poop lurk in corners waiting for me to wash them (how you like them germs, CityMama?). We don't have a real washer and dryer (we have fake ones that plug into the wall and the kitchen sink) and doing laundry is an enormous pain in my ass. I honestly daydream about having a real washer and dryer and doing laundry whenever I want at least a couple of times a day. Maybe that's why I'm not getting any work done. . .

Now that I have purged all of these things I'm not going to think about, 4 words:

Calgon, take me away.

Two weeks ago I told myself it was over. I looked in the mirror and I pumped myself up: it's over man, the 12 months of sloth and unchecked gluttony are over. Wood, Juniper, and I walked down through the Presidio to the overwhelming sporting goods megastore they opened in the old military commissary, named the Sports Basement (despite there being nothing below ground level). In all the years I have lived in California I still haven't seen a basement, except for the one the Chinese guys live in behind our apartment, but that's really more of a windowless shack than a basement. I bought a $60 pair of running shoes, and $150 worth of running gear and apparel. I have always been a "run in the old vintage t-shirts that I became too cool to wear in non-athletic situations" kind of guy, but in the mirrors at The Sports Basement I looked like a professional runner dude who could handle all those hailstorms and 120 degree days you get in Golden Gate Park. I even bought a headband.

And understand: I am cheap. One of the secrets about why I really didn't want a doula is because those ladies are expensive! So as a part of my cheapness, when I drop a chunk of money like that on some gear, I tend to use it to make it worth the spending. I ran the San Francisco marathon four years ago, not because I wanted to get in shape or have the bragging rights, but because on a whim one day I dropped $65 on the registration fee and it would have killed me to let that go to waste by not running the race. So a few weeks ago I figured, I'll spend all kinds of money on gear, and that means I'll actually exercise now.

Wrong.

When Wood got pregnant, I took that as an excuse to eat whatever the fuck I wanted and not do a damn thing on my feet. She put on the pounds, I put on the pounds, it was all good. It wasn't sympathy weight, I'm just not a very sympathetic person. I am, however, lazy and always hungry. I started drinking beers, trying out all the Trader Joes brands with colorful labels. I tried German beers and Czech beers and beers from Oregon. Wood was falling asleep on the couch at like, 8:00 p.m., and I had nothing to do but drink. My relatively slim torso started bulking up. I started ignoring mirrors. "Things will get easier when the baby's born," I said. Ha! When we came home from the hospital a few days after Juniper was born, Wood rushed to her closet, and started trying on all her old pre-maternity clothes. They all fit. Meanwhile, I contemplated buying my shirts in "L" rather than "M." Would that hide what's happened to me? Why is that mirror there next to the shower? Jesus, who is that fat fuck? Where did I get all those chins? Even Juniper doesn't have that many chins! Why am I suddenly the fattest person in the house?

My fancy new shoes are sitting in their box. None of the clothes stink yet. They still smell fresh, like Indonesia or Pakistan or wherever they were made. Ah, the new clothes smell. I just can't bear to cover that up with the chicken soup stink of running sweat. I'm doing it for the clothes, damn it! I had grandiose plans of running the four miles home from work every day, but logistics got in the way. Logistics, and, well, Nob Hill. The truth is, I want to get back to my baby as fast as I can and when I'm with her I just want to hold her up in the air above my head while she laughs. Daylight savings time will soon be over. Those 4:30 p.m. Frisco sunsets are the best excuse in the world not to run. I'm too cheap and too scared of locker rooms to join a gym. My days to get back into shape are numbered.

But Wood, as always, will be my saving grace. Tired of the lumpy, heavy-breathing oaf that replaced her husband, she just bought a $300 jogging stroller. Man, she knows that it will KILL me to know that thing is just sitting in the garage, unused. We're going for a run tomorrow, damn it. Sat goodbye to fat daddy, baby. His days are numbered.

Dutch didn't really make it clear that we were FIRED by our doula. I mean, pretty much. Here's what happened:

Like Dutch said, I met with the doula first. From the beginning he wasn't really into it, but hey, I was the one with a baby in my belly that had to come out somehow, and that meant that I got to call the shots.

I talked to the doula on the phone a couple of times, and then I had her come over one night when Dutch was conveniently working late. And she was great. Really, really great. We had an awesome conversation and she listened to me talk about my pregnancy in the way that I wanted my OB to listen, but had yet to realize just does not happen with OBs (yes, I should have hired a midwife. next time). She asked questions, she offered advice, and she gave me book suggestions. And, to this day, despite the falling out that was to come, I still owe her big time for the book suggestions. She nudged me towards Ina May Gaskin, and for that alone, she rocks.

She showed me her bag of tricks. Her adorable hipster-thrift-store-purchased bag of tricks (oh how I coveted that slightly faded, just garish enough print, and those well-worn leathery handles). Her bag of tricks did include aromatherapy and tennis ball socks, and I was SO INTO IT. Right on, sister, I thought. I sniffed her little bottles, I felt her home-made massage tools, I examined her sticks of honey, and I nodded my head and made approving noises. I concluded that she was exactly what I needed and I told her so. I also warned her that Dutch wasn't completely on board yet, but that I was working on it, and that he just needed time. She understood, she told me to call her.

About a month later my belly had finally grown big enough that Dutch was forced to recognize that I was the shot-caller, and he started to tow the party line on the doula. He said he understood, he said he wanted to be supportive, and he was ready to meet with her. He said he was still afraid that I was trying to replace him, and I assured him that he was ridiculous but encouraged him to talk with her about his feelings. He said he would. And even though Dutch can be a pretty standoff-ish guy, he was pretty cool about the doula at this point. More than cool -- he was open. And as you might have guessed, openness is a rare state for Dutch.

The doula came over, and it was like Dutch said it was. AWKWARD. It was horrible -- an unbelievable, staggering sort of awkward, where you assume that the next thing out of your mouth will finally break the ice, but it never does, and it just gets worse. I was waiting for the doula to sort of take over; I mean, this is what she does, she works with couples, so I guess I expected her to have questions or thoughts or at least lead the discussion. But she stonewalled, and instead we had strange conversations where she was sort of suggesting that we start all over (leave my OB, get a midwife; leave the hospital, go to the birthing center) and we were like, Hell-ooooo? This baby is due in 2 months, and if we got a midwife and went to a birthing center, why would we need you?

But the worst was when Dutch said: "I mean, I just don't think a birth center in the mission is for us." And while he was just being honest, the way he said "mission" conveyed some of the disdain he holds for the mission that he explained in his post. And the doula just sat there in silence and made no response. I don't know if she picked up on his anti-mission-ness and was personally insulted, or if she was just annoyed that we didn't want to do what she thought we should, but either way, I could tell she just wasn't that into us.

She called the next day to break it off. She asked me if I wanted her to suggest another doula, but I told her it was okay. We only had two months to go, so I gave up on my dream of having a doula.

And, having elbowed the doula out of the way, Dutch stepped up to the task and read "The Birth Partner" cover to cover. He prepared his own bag of tricks (including some aromatherapy and tennis balls), and he repeatedly told everyone how he was going to be the best doula ever. Once I tried to explain to him that he was the father and that was way better, but then I gave up because it was just so damn cute to hear him say it.

So the Bug's due date came, my contractions started, and we were all ready. Dutch was an amazing partner -- far better than I would have ever thought my husband, the guy who comforted me during my morning sickness by reminding me that I was the one who wanted to be pregnant, could be. It was because of him that I finally took off the stupid oxygen mask and moved around the room even though I didn't think I could do it. It was because he kept telling me how "fucking tough" I was that I didn't cave in the 17th time the nurse asked me if I was sure that I didn't want an epidural? how about narcotics? a little morphine? And it was because of him that the whole thing went so damn smoothly -- without a hitch, stitch, or regret. I wouldn't have changed a thing. I did have the best doula ever.

I thought I would never have to see the doula again.

I have been boycotting the San Francisco neighborhood known as "the mission" for almost a year now, vowing never to venture south of 14th street and east of Noe. The Mission is the gentrified hipster neighborhood full of artist chicks with carrie-donovan glasses and yoga mats, panhandling Mexican troubadours, and "dive bars" crammed with Judds on the prowl every Friday and Saturday night. The Mission is the juddliest neighborhood because, just as most San Franciscans can't fathom living anywhere else in the country, most Mission-dwellers cannot imagine living anywhere else in the city. It's just like the Marina in that way. Instead of Marina chicks you have Judds and artists. I haven't made up my mind about which is worse.

The woman who was our doula for a few weeks lives there, so I figured I would never have to see her. I was wrong.

Let me back up. Back before Juniper was born, Wood was sure she wanted a doula to assist during the birth. All the books said doulas were such a great help. I think she just like the sound of the word. Doula. Doula. Sounds so peaceful, right? Helpful. Knowledgeable. A little hippie-dippy maybe. Knowing my predilection for all things ancient and Greek, Wood told me that it was an ancient Greek word for "female assistant." I was like, no, sorry, it means slave. Doula is the ancient Greek word for slave.

So Wood really wanted one of these slaves. I didn't. I pictured the doula as an annoyance, an interloper, wafting aromatherapy bottles in Wood's face and talking about chakras and chanting over the placenta. The birth slaves in the videos we watched in our birthing classes certainly did not shake this idea from my head. They were all fifty-year old lesbians with gray marine-corps hair and wood-beaded necklaces and flowery muumuus. One of them was wearing one of those little stiff caps with an African print on it. I looked at my wife as if she was nuts. "You want one of those in the birthing room with us?" Sure, if we were Ina May Gaskin types having Tantric sex and reading books by Deepak Chopra and listening to "world music" I could picture inviting someone like that into our home for a home birth in the sacred porcelain claw-foot bathtub, and I wouldn't have blinked when she showed up on our doorstep with a boombox blasting Enya and a selection of vegan snacks. But that's not who we are. It's chicks like that that drove us away from the Rainbow Grocery co-op forever by rudely elbowing us to get at the last carob-coconut squares. Having already been driven away from Whole Foods by the Judds and yuppies, where could we shop? What choice was there for two reasonable people who wanted to have a natural hospital birth? Wood was convinced she had to have a slave in the hospital room to hold back the anesthesiologists and clogged-foot nurses clutching hypodermics and IV bags and stop her OB from slicing into her and pulling the baby out so she could make a dinner appointment on time. At first I indulged her.

Wood smartly kept me out of the process of interviewing slaves. I didn't want to have anything to do with them, and I let her know I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't just my new-agey hippie prejudice that made me feel this way, it was my honest feeling that we didn't need a stranger in the room with us. That this was something we could do, just the two of us. I told Wood there wasn't anything a doula could do that I couldn't do. I bought and read "The Birth Partner" and declared myself the doula. Still, Wood searched on.

Wood conspired with the doula for several weeks over the telephone before I was allowed to meet her. "I really, really like her," Wood said. They had met for coffee. She had shown Wood her bag of tricks, full of patchouli-smelling gewgaws and oils. Wood said she was going to hire her. I braced myself for the inevitable. We were hiring a slave. Wood nervously scheduled a time for the doula to meet me. I came home from work that day wearing a suit, and slumped into a chair across our living room from her after weakly shaking her hand.

She was cute. Young, at least. A hipster. No muumuu. No wood-beaded necklace. No African print stiff cap. Maybe this won't be that bad, I thought. I looked at her business card M____ C_______, "mother, doula, knitter, artist," it said. Oh crap.

It was the most awkward conversation ever. As Wood and I tried to articulate what we wanted from the birth experience, she just sat there, nodding. But nothing we said seemed to be having an impact. "You should try to change from the hospital to the Sage Femme Birth Center in the mission," she said. "It's run by midwives. It's much more supportive." I tried to tell her my insurance might not cover that, and she said many insurance plans cover it. We told her we wanted to have the birth in the safety of a hospital, and she told us that Sage Femme has a relationship with San Francisco General in case of an emergency. San Francisco General? That's where junkies go to die! Does she consider that a selling point? I'm sure Sage Femme is a great place to squeeze out a kid but at the time Wood and I weren't ready for that. We were nervous first-time parents. Maybe next time, we said. She looked peeved. I realized she was judging us. Worse, she was condemning our choices. Fucking Mission hipster. The conversation only got worse. I was trying to be honest, and it was my understanding that a doula's first responsibility was to be understanding and tolerant of the choices of the family she would be working with. Not this one. Her $700 fee did not include tolerance or understanding, but damn did she have some aromatherapy bottles and a tennis ball in a sock that felt great when rubbed across a pregnant woman's spine! Well, I already had a sock and I could find a tennis ball in the bushes outside the courts in Golden Gate park.

What good is a slave if she doesn't listen to you?

Wood was uneasy about the meeting. She didn't like the way it had gone down. She didn't like how judgmental and awkward the doula had been. The next day, the doula called her. "I really don't think I should work with you and your husband," she said. What a relief.

If there is a fundamental difference between Wood and I, it is tolerance. Wood is open to things, like astrology, that I have no patience for. I got kicked out of the psychic fair that they have in the county fair building in golden gate park once for making nasty faces at the tarot card readers while Wood and the Leggy Swede had their auras cleansed. I hate that fakey new-agey spiritualist tripe. I mean, I despise it equally with all those other wacky religions out there (you know: Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Scientology). I think the doula knew I would call her out on all her bullshit and like any snake-oil salesman, she turned tail and ran once suspicion was aroused. Wood knew it was all bullshit too, but Wood is a much better person than I am. She is far more tolerant of bullshit, even entertained by it. But Wood was also scared. She wanted a voice in the room that had gone through birth before. She wanted somebody in the room who could be strong, and she didn't know yet if she could trust me to be that person. The 20th century has been such a dark age of obstetric philosophy. I wholeheartedly believe that Ina May Gaskin and others in the midwifery/natural childbirth movement have the right idea, 100 percent. But I am troubled at the overall stranglehold these new-agey archfeminist muumuu types have over the movement. I think all the Enya and aromatherapy and meditation are a barrier to changing birthing policy across the social spectrum. If this shit is continued to be viewed as "wacky" or "weird" it is going to be much harder to convince the medical establishment to change, let alone convince your average Southern Belle scheduling her epidural. So peace to all midwifes and doulas who handle their shit with the professionalism their job deserves. Safe, natural birth shouldn't just be the province of nutbuckets.

Wood and I were alone for 95 percent of the birthing process. We left home for the hospital almost eight hours after the contractions started. My hands never left her. I helped her fight the urge to succumb to a nurse's offer of narcotics. She didn't have an epidural. She didn't use any pain relieving drugs. It was painful as hell for her. Juniper came out in two pushes. I did my best to fill the role she saw a doula filling, but even more I filled the role I myself wanted to fill. I was her birth partner. We had relied on each other for nine years at that point, and I was not going to let her down. I was going to do everything that she needed from me, and more. I do not think I could have been that person if a doula had been in the room, acting assured and relevant, pushing me to the sidelines, a stranger there in our way during the most poignant moment of our lives.

So when I saw the doula the other day, eating in a cafe outside her blessed Mission District with her kids and husband, I looked at her and kissed Juniper's head and thought: "We didn't need you after all."

I used to think that all of those warnings about kids and plastic bags were for idiots. Warnings like these:

"Warning: To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this plastic bag away from babies and children. Do not use this bag in cribs, beds, carriages or playpens. The plastic bag could block nose and mouth and prevent breathing. This bag is not a toy."

Of course a plastic bag is not a toy. What's fun about a plastic bag? And what sort of moron would let their child play with one?

But now that I have a child who hyperventilates with anticipation and joy at the sight of a plastic bag, I understand. Plastic bags ARE fun, apparently. Juniper is at the stage where she wants to grab everything, but she saves a special amount of fervor for plastic bags. Just the mere rustle and crinkle of plastic causes her to lurch her small body out of my arms in a desperate attempt to make contact. She wants to hold the plastic, lick it, stuff it into her mouth, and roll around in it. Not that I let her. But until the bag is out of her sight, she does that goofy puppy-like panting thing.

And now I see, that to a 5 month old, this looks like SO MUCH FUN:

Thank god for the warnings, huh?

Yesterday, as the bug, Dutch and I were walking home from one of our long walks around town, we passed one of those stores that sell used kids' stuff that are usually called things like "Too Good to be Through" or "Twice as Nice." I think the name of this particular one is "Clothes-Go-Round." And of course they're pretty great -- like garage sales that are open Monday through Friday.

When we walked past the "Go-Round," it was long closed. But down on the sidewalk in front of the door was a single black and white plastic teething ring. I stopped, looked at Dutch, and we both looked down at the ring. We were both thinking the same thing: the bug would LOVE that ring.

At some point on the mile or so walk to our apartment from there, I rubbed the ring between my thumb and index finger and it occurred to me what could be on this ring. Clement street is one of our favorite streets in the city, but it's not known for its cleanliness (let's just say it's no presidio heights). Chinese fish shops throw still-wriggling chunks of bloody fish into icy sidewalk bins and after a long hot afternoon they just wash the sidewalk with a hose; Irish bars stay open well past the legal closing time and drunk expatriots puke all over the sidewalks until the wee hours o' the mornin'; cigarettes everywhere, fruit from Chinese markets rotting everywhere, and there is always a 37% chance you will end up with gum on the bottom of your shoe. so it's not the cleanest place in the world (nor is it the mission or the lower haight or that strip of golden gate park where all the pot-dealers hang out). With all this in mind, I washed the ring in hot water with antibacterial soap before handing it off to the bug. Who knows what would have happened if I had given it to her when Dutch wanted to, i.e. three seconds after picking it up off the ground.

The ring is black and white (which she loves, since she is a baby, and black and white to babies must be psychedelic or something). It has a pencil-like diameter, and is the perfect size for her little hands. And now it is her favorite toy. We had been looking for black and white teething toys everywhere, but I swear all these companies think parents will only buy colorful ones, and Dutch has just about had it with all of the damn colors this baby has brought into our apartment. Dutch spent two years buying sleek modern furniture for our apartment before I got pregnant, and he had at least two or three nervous breakdowns in the infant department of Target looking at multi-colored exersaucers and gingham winnie-the-pooh swings. So we love the black and white teething ring, and more imporantly, so does she. Of course some mothers wouldn't give their baby a little teething toy they found on the sidewalk near Clement street, but that's just not the kind of mother I am.

We ride MUNI with Juniper all the time, and the 1, the 33, the 38, the 49, the 5, the 21, are all tolerable, aside from the occasional stinky whinos who plop down next to her and the old Chinese ladies who either (1) give me unblinking, angry stares because they apparently don't think a man should be taking care of a baby; or (2) give me smiles but then reach out and touch and grab the bug the entire bus ride. Does anyone else get bugged out by strangers touching their kid? I would never touch a stranger's kid, and yet so many people feel a sense of entitlement about it, as though I am being rude when I turn or walk away with the baby. Juniper doesn't care. She smiles for everyone. She smiles at that tragic Man With No Face who rides the 31 Balboa and reads the paper even though I can't figure out where his eyes are. That's what makes babies so great.

But generally, people are way cooler on regular buses when you have a baby in a bjorn. I sometimes get to sit up front with the old ladies and the handicapped folks. People give me their seats in the back if the front is full of old folks. People smile and are generally pleasant.

The same cannot be said of the Judd-filled express buses. These are buses that go directly from the outer neighborhoods down to the financial district during rush hour skipping the tenderloin and the western addition. So these buses are filled with business-casual clad Judds and too many women with Louis Vuitton handbags. Earth to professional middle-aged women in the central Richmond: those bags, real or fake, do not make you look classy or elegant. They make you look LAME.

Express bus riders in Frisco are among most selfish and rude people I have ever encountered. Perhaps the relentless drudgery of their office work turns them into nasty, spiteful trolls who suck all enjoyment out of the summer air around them, or maybe they just haven't had their morning coffee. They pack these buses to the gills and the people who get seats completely ignore everyone who gets on. I rarely get a seat, and have watched with anger as women nine months pregnant are forced to stand for 30 minutes of jerky traffic while a cadre of Judds sat there too engrossed in their blackberries or just too lazy to give up their seat. When Wood was pregnant she rode this bus every day to get to BART and she was given a seat maybe 2 or 3 times. I don't want to get into the "is pregnancy a disability" debate, but seriously, fuck you, you motherfucking Judd asshole who finds it more important to read the first chapter of "The Life of Pi" or "Confederacy of Dunces" than to notice my wife's eight-month pregnant belly being jerked back and forth by the braking of the bus right in front of your face. I'm not a chivalrous person, I don't open doors for Wood, but I sure as shit give up my seat to a pregnant woman when I can.

A few days ago I got a seat and had that opportunity when a very pregnant woman got on the bus and no one in those front seats offered her a respite from her feet. I stood up and gave her the seat, and stood there smugly towering above the Judds and the Louis Vuitton handbags held on laps. Nobody gave a shit, but at least for twenty-five minutes I wasn't one of them. A few weeks ago I had the bug in the bjorn and I was down in the financial district and I got on a packed express bus to go home. There were no seats, so I stood. I stood there with a baby and no one even made eye contact with me. I seethed with anger, and I realized they were turning me into one of them: an angry troll broken down by the negativity of my environment. I slid a couple of the windows open and enjoyed the breeze and tried to make the best of it, bouncing the bug up and down and speaking softly into her ear, telling her how much I love her.

I've been told that people are the same on the BART and on the N-Judah and other streetcar lines, but that no one is like this in New York or other major cities. Is that the case? Why is it that professional San Franciscans can be such selfish jerks?

Judd:
Pronunciation: jŭdd
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English judde, from Old English jwudu; akin to Old High German juti,

A twenty/thirty-something, straight white male San Franciscan, politically liberal, sensitive to feminism, multi-culturalism, and gay rights; employed in a professional setting (usually as something vague like a “consultant” or an “analyst”) but who usually pretends to want to be either a writer, comic book artist, video game designer or a deejay; would seem gay in other cities but is the archetypal straight man in Frisco; well-intentioned, eager to please, and insecure about style and taste but slavishly follows the latest trends. Drinks wine, jogs regularly. Has definitely done yoga at least once. Moved to San Francisco after college, usually during the dot-com era (but definitely does not call it Frisco). Godfather and namesake: Judd Winick, from Real World III.

[click on the image to get a clearer version]

One of my friends moved out to San Francisco right after she graduated college in 2000 and back in the provinces I would get e-mails about her life here, and all the cool things she was seeing or doing. 64% of these e-mails involved seeing ex-Real World people. "Ohmygod, Montana from RW Boston lives on the next block from me, I saw her picture on the wall of my dry cleaners and I followed her to the bus stop the other day!" this would be followed several weeks later by, "I saw Irene the crazy chick with Lyme disease from RW Seattle when I was at a coffee shop the other day" and the next winter, "Jamie from RW New Orleans was driving behind us the entire way back from Tahoe last weekend" and "my friend hooked up with that guy 'Yes' from Road Rules semester at sea." At this point, I was less than enthused. I wanted to shout, "yo those people are not real celebrities, and even if they were, they suck." But my friendship was hanging by a thread at this point so I indulged her. It was kind of fun to make fun of these people, how desperately they tried to exploit and cling to their ephemeral recognition. Eric Nies, bitches. The worst stories my friend related to me were the ones about Judd. Judd Winick, the whiny, overly-sensitive cartoonist from RW San Francisco was fucking everywhere. I would get reports of Judd sightings all over town. "Judd was at Blondie's on Valencia, drinking a martini right out there in those seats by the sidewalk." I'll bet he was. Judd was on Haight street trying on shirts at Kweejibo. Judd was rollerblading in the park with Pam. I got so sick of hearing about Judd. Argghhhh!

Judd was always my least favorite Real Worlder. His interactions with Puck just annoyed the crap out of me, he was just so damn sensitive and politically correct and he couldn't see that Puck was just a dick who was trying to get a rise out of him. Trying, and pretty much always succeeding. Judd just oozed that early nineties Eggersian eager-to-prove-generation-x-isn't-lazy-and-heartless vibe, plus that using-my-overt-and-affected-sensitivity-to-get-with-chicks thing that so many high school losers pull once they arrive at their freshman dorms. Hey, I know that schtick well, and it just pained me to see Judd do it over and over and over in front of a national audience. Was he going to sleep with Cory the insecure/chubby future fag-hag, or would he talk his way into the sultry doe-eyed Latina Republican's bunkbed? The guy was so visibly desperate I don't think he cared which, which is so funny because he ended up marrying Pam, the cute, freckled med student who just kind of floated on a cloud of her own ambition above the heads of the rest of the contestants. I'm sure she saw the truth: Judd was generally a good, earnest, decent guy. But I hope in the years since Pam has scraped away some of that icky straight white male, put-me-through-a-crucifixion-goddamnit-liberal guilt and forced Judd to take himself a little less seriously. I doubt it. I remember being in a bookstore a few years ago and seeing a graphic novel Judd wrote about Pedro. It was titled something hopelessly banal like "Pedro and Me" and contained some of the most insipid, pull-off-my-fingernails-rather-than-force-me-to-read-this-shit dialogue I have ever encountered. I didn't trust Pedro. I just never trust characters who pronounce anglicized Spanish words with unecessarily-excessive Spanish accents when they generally speak English without an accent. Pedro would be talking English without much of an accent and suddenly he would pronounce "San Francisco" or "burrito" like he had just pulled Rachel up from a tango dip with a rose between her teeth in a Havana nightclub. I know, I know, that may be how these things are said in Miami, but a burrito is a burrito. You don't have to roll them Rs. It always stops conversation, makes me uncomfortable. Generally I have no problem with native Spanish speakers doing it, it's the middle-class white folks who spend a semester in Seville or Costa Rica who do it that bug me out the most. Pedro was a smart motherfucker. He was politically savvy and he educated a lot of people. But I still found him kind of annoying (though maybe that was partly due to the seedy glow of Judd's incessant P.C. pandering). Pedro used MTV and the Real World platform to promote his important and timely message almost as well as Judd has used his friendship with Pedro to promote himself and his work over the past decade. Oh well, everybody's got to earn a living. . . Frisco rents aren't cheap.

[note: I realize these are real people. but as seminal figures of reality television, they put themselves in a unique position to be criticized by the likes of me. they volunteered for that shit, they benefited from it, and I'm sure they're thick-skinned as hell after fifteen years of dealing with people who found the way they were portrayed by MTV's editors annoying. I don't pretend to know anything about Judd other than how he portrayed himself for the camera.]

As I see it, Judd is an icon, an archetype. Yes, a stereotype too. Judd himself has been a visible man-about-town and in one season's worth of edited footage he represented in a way the mentality of a lot of the young men who move to Frisco after college and find themselves navigating the social and political waters of this very unique city. Sensitive, liberal, self-deprecating. Eager to please, desperate for true love but frightened of growing old or responsible, filled with vaguely-artistic dying ambitions. The key to Juddness is how ordinary it is out here. Anywhere else in the country they might be extraordinary. Anywhere else they might be interesting. But here they are the default template of emasculated heterosexuality. They have given up life as big fish back in the burbs to dart through our streets like schools of minnows. Frisco has no real working class population; instead we have Judd drones and their female counterparts, working in the financial district, going out in the Mission on the weekends, listening to trendy music on their trendy iPods and watching indie films and e-mailing in coffee shops with WIFI. Many of them came out here for dotcom and stayed. And they're getting old and kind of sad.

One of the reasons I disparage them is because all Judds believe that that Frisco is the greatest city on earth, coupled with complete disdain for the rest of America (except Manhattan), notwithstanding the fact that they all come from that other America. I just have this thing against people who hate where they come from and fail to see that even the bad or annoying things about where they come from helped form and shape their identity, in a way that should reasonably lead towards some level of ambivalence about where they come from. I get uncomfortable around people who talk endless shit about their parents. All of this is a form of self-hatred that I find particularly loathsome, even though I occasionally find myself in its trap.

So I am constantly fighting off my own inner Judd. Even Judds grow up. I recently read that Judd W. and Pam had a baby boy in May. I am sure that one day soon, I will run into him on a sidewalk in Laurel Heights, and we will face each other, black baby bjorn to black baby bjorn. And I will hang my head and walk past him, and think, this is what it comes to. I should just accept it. This is who I am now. We could have coffee. We could talk about the inevitable move to the suburbs. There is no escaping him. To steal a line from Yeats: Judd haunts me. He is always just round the next corner. But goddamnit I need to try to fight him.

First of all, I am going to call it Frisco. Fuck Herb Caen. The vast-majority of non-Chinese, non-Latino "local" people who were born here and still live here a generation later are all cloistered in their $6 million houses in Seacliff or Pacific Heights or Russian Hill and I'm just a shitstain on the sidewalk to those people anyway. I have decided that I am going to start calling all great American cities by their silly nicknames. The Big Apple. The Windy City. Motown. Sin City. I am going to do it in casual conversation just to annoy people. It drives me crazy how all these Judds roll their eyes every time someone says the word "Frisco," as if rolling their eyes is going to change the fact that they themselves grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland or Kansas City and this rolling of the eyes somehow legitimizes them as locals. Shut the fuck up, Judd. Then there's that stupid laundromat in Hayes Valley named after Caen's book. Don't call it Frisco. Why not? Because some jerk in a mumu who owns a laundromat in gentrification central doesn't think I should? The longshoremen we displaced from the city called it Frisco, but just because in 1953 some martini-swilling hack told us not to, now generations of Judds eager to prove that they're exactly what they're not (i.e. locals) can insist on me not calling it Frisco. Bitch, I've lived here three years but I'm still a tourist. There's no way I am ever going to afford a house with a yard and when you have a five-month old daughter that means your days are numbered. And I'm sure as shit never going to move to Contra Costra or Marin. And guess what? EVERYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY CALLS IT FRISCO. In honor of my provincial heritage, so will I. Herb Caen grew up in Sacramento and didn't move to Frisco till he was twenty. Just another Judd insecure with his place in the world, I think. So call it what you want. Call it San Fran. If you're a trucker, call it the Gay Bay. You've earned that right, and I don't care.

When I went to put Juniper in her car seat this morning, I realized it was soaking wet. I ran my finger across the surface of the material and brought it up to my nose (a gesture I don't even think twice about since becoming a father) , and gave it a big sniff. Piss. It was definitely piss. But the thing was, there was piss everywhere, not just in the part where she would have peed herself, and besides, she hadn't been in the car seat since 3:00 p.m. the previous day and she certainly wasn't wet when when we took her out of the car yesterday.

Then it hit me: that 87-year old Chinese bagpipe player that Wood was hanging out with into the wee hours of last night took a piss in my daughter's carseat! Why did he do that? I questioned Wood: Did you see him whip it out? Did you hear any trickling water in the back seat? Wood doubted that he actually took a piss in the car seat, and I said, girl, you've been to China. You know those motherfuckers will piss in almost anything. Meanwhile I'm holding Junebug up by her armpits, not willing to lay her in the wet pissstinking seat.

Wait, Wood says, he did have something with all his weird boxes and instrument cases and bagpipes, he had something all wrapped up in a plastic bag, and he might have set that down in the carseat. I nodded, then swiped my finger through the wet fabric again and had another sniff. Maybe it wasn't piss. It did kind of smell like one of those Chinese herbal pharmacies you walk past on Stockton or Clement streets, the kind with the jars of dried abalones, mushrooms, deer antlers, pearls, dried lizards, dried sea horses, powdered dragon bones, shark fins, tigers' teeth etc. There is that smell you get when you walk past one of those places where you are like: CHINA, smells like CHINA. It also kind of smelled like that smell when you order Chinese food from the kind of restaurant that doesn't cater to a western crowd, the kind that always has 70 Chinese families eating at round tables and waiters in stained tuxedos, the smell when you have your take out boxes and they're sitting next to you in the car and you're kind of like, is that right? Or, it could have just smelled like spilled tea. The bottom line is I need to get my olfactory sensitivity to catch up to imagination.

That will probably happen when Juniper starts eating solid food. I hear there are smells down there that a human can barely imagine.

All in all, I was jealous that I didn't get to go to the bar last night and speak pidgin Chinese with the 87-year old bagpipe player who made everyone uncomfortable. I told Wood the next time she watches Juniper, I get to go to a bar where the devilettes have hired a Mormon lesbian riding a tapir to play the jew's harp all night long between sets, and I will get to drive her home and see what the tapir leaves in the car sear.