Beautiful Absurdities: The P Sign

Back in school, a friend and I lived in the same apartment building. Shortly after moving in, in part fueled by the anticipatory buzz that hangs over a college town in late August, we created MouseCon. MouseCon (a play on words on DefCon) was comprised of a couple simple elements. First, we had numbered stickers, 1 through 5, which we stuck to my buddy’s kitchen doorjamb vertically and well-spaced, from about belly-button height to eye level. Underneath each of the 5 numbers, we hammered a nail into the wall. Finally, we took a plastic mouse, whose tail would hang nicely from one of the five nails.

My buddy's task was to adjust MouseCon periodically to reflect his mood by hanging the mouse on the nail that best reflected how he was feeling. If he was maniacally happy, he would move the plastic mouse up to the highest nail, which was described as MouseCon Five. If he was sad and depressed, the mouse would hang from the lowest nail, MouseCon One. If suicidal, the plastic mouse resided on the floor. Sometimes I'd walk into his apartment and see him moping a bit and walk over and adjust MouseCon downard myself.

[an aside: Y'know how they say that if you make yourself physically smile it makes you happier because of the psychological associations? We tried experimenting like that with MouseCon by moving MouseCon up from 2 to 4 to see if my buddy would automatically get happier, but, alas, it never worked]

Obviously MouseCon was completely stupid, the type of thing that college kids with too much time on their hands do. But it was one of my favorite kinds of things, because although it was a little bit funny and completely stupid, it was more weird and absurd than it was stupid or funny. When you explained it to people (after looking at the two of us with a quizzical look suggesting "when are you guys going to come out of the closet?") they would maybe chuckle, maybe ask a question, but they'd mostly just feel a tad awkward and get an weird expression on their faces. And I loved it

I can be an odd bird. I like absurd stuff (if you can make it exciting or personal, even better). But I figured when I had kids, some kinds of weird fun things would become available to me because of the kids (after all, no one but my kids would be impressed, or want to see me pretending like my belly was a face, with nipples for eyes, etc.), but most absurd or wacky stuff would be in my past.

On the one hand, most people know that a kid that's 3 or 4 years old is a virtual machine for creating absurdities, but most of it isn't the good kind of absurdity. It’s the kind absurdity like any question you ask gets answered with “Kwee Kwoo” for an hour. If that was it, it would suck. But luckily, kids create all kinds of truly absurd situations – situations that those without kids never even get close to - that can give you an outlet for the side of your personality that has a love for the weird.

Enough talk. An example:

When my eldest daughter was about 2 1/2 or 3 years old, one day she complained that it hurt her to pee and that she didn't want to do it. We tried to get her to go, but she wouldn’t. And she hadn't gone for quite a while. Part of me just thought “let’s just walk away and eventually she’ll have to go, and we’ll clean it up then.” But I remembered the cause of death of the famous astronomer Tyco Brahe (burst bladder), and my daughter was not taking it well, getting more and more upset. So my wife began asking her questions about her malady. “Does it burn?” Etc. My wife turned to me and the phrase “bladder infection” was used. I announced that I had recognized that there was an Official LadyProblem discussion occurring and I was therefore invoking my rights as a male to immediately suspend the discussion until I could get out of earshot. So I went into my bedroom, shut the door and knelt to pray to God to thank him that I'm not a single father that had to deal with crap like that myself.

My prayers weren’t answered however, as even though I watched two whole episodes of syndicated Simpsons, I began to hear, through the door, the increasingly pained and whiny sounds emanating from my daughter and the increasingly frustrated and pleading sounds coming from my wife. I began to felt guilty and realized I couldn't do my ostrich impression any longer, so I came out of my room to find my wife in the bathroom with my daughter, who was naked and in the bathtub, with my wife trying to coax my daughter to, well, do her business in the tub. Things were not going well.

"But you CAN'T go potty in the tub," my daughter screamed.

“You can this time. It’s OK,” my wife said. My wife indicated that they had been back and forth from tub to potty for the past hour and that my daughter refused to use the potty.

I winked at my wife to indicate to her to play along, and asked my daughter how things were going. I got a scream in response.

Ignoring my daughter, I said to my wife, "Did you put up the P sign?"

"What are you talking about?" my wife said.

"The P sign, of course. You don't know about the P sign? Duh!"

Our daughter anxiously watched our exchange.

"No, I don't know about it."

"You have to make a sign that has a big P on it that makes it OK to pee in the bathtub, because you're normally not allowed to do that."

"Oh. [Daughter], c'mon let's go make one."

"OK" said my daughter.

Daughter sprang from the tub and we whisked her downstairs in a blanket and gave her markers. I slapped a white sheet of paper in front of her, and my wife guided her hand and they drew a giant capital P that filled the page. My daughter very quickly decorated it with a few stickers and, of course, quickly drew some small animals, we stuck a few masking tape donuts on the back and we sped back up the stairs to the bathroom and let my daughter slap the sign on the bathroom wall above the tub. My daughter climbed back in the tub.

And while she sat in the tub and stared at the P sign, our problems drained away.

(Of course, when I realized a few months later that we never actually took the P sign down after that night, it made me wonder a bit about the baths that occurred in those intervening months.)