Gifts of the Magi

By Conor | March 10th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Speaking of birthdays – and we were – March is one of those months where everybody seems to have a birthday. In our family’s case, it is our parents; three birthdays in five days. On the gift front, for Liz’s dad and my stepmother, Rachel, you can’t go wrong with some kind of specialty cookbook – something fancy that costs thirty five dollars and has on its cover a thick cutting board with a beautifully lit chunk of asiago on it which is a cheese that I don’t even think existed two years ago but now nobody can shut up about it.

(If Rachel or Liz’s dad is reading this: Spoiler alert in previous paragraph!!!!)

Finn would similarly appreciate this kind of cookbook, but mostly because he could open it a few times, then tear the cover, then put one corner in his mouth, then yell a bit like this: “YAYAYAYA,” then crawl as fast as he could toward the fridge in hopes that somebody might open it and he could make a little fort out of the vegetable dehydrator.

So, not really worth thirty five bucks.
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Finn’s 1st Birthday and the Problem with Woody Allen

By Conor | March 2nd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

The reunion of the Grennan and Flanagan families, on the occasion of Finn’s first birthday, was the kind of gathering where you could look around the dinner table and know exactly how each person felt about Woody Allen.
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What the Dentist Said

By Conor | February 17th, 2010 | No Comments »

If, God forbid, I should ever slip into a vegetative state, there are two people I want there by my hospital bed. The first is my wife Liz, who shall hold my hand lovingly and put deodorant on me so I don’t get some smart-ass nickname from the hospital staff like B.O. McHoolihan or Sir Smells-a-Lot, and my son’s first words don’t have something to do with the olfactory.

The second person I want there is my dentist, Dr. Siu.

Dr. Siu is an old friend of my brother Dave. Dr. Siu is not merely the finest dentist in New York; he also performs his dentistry while pontificating on almost any topic under the sun. Moreover, he does this breezily, without so much as an awkward pause, with virtually no response from the other party, whose jaw is open just wide enough to insert a sofa. And he does all this as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

He is – and I choose these words carefully – one of a kind.
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New Year’s in Nepal: Home of the World’s Smallest Man

By Conor | January 5th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I first learned about the World’s Smallest Man from the kids in our children’s home.

They were very proud of him. They knew him by name. I was not surprised. I like small countries like Nepal because they have a few things for which they demand recognition. In Nepal, the claim to fame du jour is the world’s smallest man. The fact that they have the world’s tallest mountain – that every school child around the planet has heard of Mount Everest – is old news. Similarly, the birthplace of the Buddha is in Nepal. He was born in Nepal. The Buddha! He’s Nepalese! You think the Hoboken-ites take pride in Frank Sinatra? They got the freakin’ Buddha!

But they don’t talk about that. Again, old news.
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Healthier.

By Conor | November 17th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

In New York City, smoking is so rare that the mere sight of somebody walking down the street with a cigarette in their hand is arresting; he or she may as well have cymbals fastened to the insides of their knees, squeezing an oversized novelty car horn. It’s strange, because New York never struck me as a particularly healthy city. Maybe New Yorkers do still smoke, but just not out in the street, not while walking among the discriminating masses. Maybe it’s an etiquette thing. After all, I may love my wife’s lasagna, but I’m not going to be seen on Lexington Avenue shoveling forkfuls of it into my mouth, dodging the upstream pedestrians. It would be uncouth. No couth. Read the rest of this entry »

Why I let my son eat my Economist

By Conor | September 19th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

There was a time in my life that I considered The Economist magazine to be something people only pretended to like in order to sound cool. These people were, in my mind, likely to be the same liars who pretended to like sushi.
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My new Kindle

By Conor | June 25th, 2009 | 8 Comments »

Liz bought me a Kindle for Father’s Day. (A Kindle, for the proudly uninitiated, is an electronic reading device.) It is a marvelous gift, especially for somebody who takes the subway every day. I tried it out for the first time today, taking it from my bag and pressing a button and Shazam! (Or Kapow! for those who do not speak Turkish.) My book appears, magically, at the page where I left off.

It was at that moment, on the subway, that I noticed for the first time that not only did nobody else have a Kindle, but I had never seen anybody with a Kindle on the subway. (Strange, because Amazon makes you feel like you’re the last person on Earth to be reading off mutilated, processed rainforest wood that potentially held the cure for cancer but we’ll now never know because you had to find out what happens when Shopoholic Ties the Knot.)

I also noticed people openly staring not just at it, but at me for having it (I suppose they’d already read all the in-train advertisements for celebrity podiatrists.) Holding that thin, white case, I suddenly felt like I had been beamed there from the future to spy on 2009 Earthlings, trying to act all casual in my silver neoprene unitard while standing on a Segway, and trying to fit in by breezily and loudly mentioning, in Artoo Detoo beeps and boops, that I looked forward to reading my Jonathan Grisham novel.

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The Lives of Others

By Conor | June 24th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

I got an invitation to take a Facebook quiz yesterday that asked “What Chinese City are You?” I remember thinking, what are my options? Because I know Bejing and Shanghai. Am I one of those?

I don’t know if I can take these quizzes anymore, because frankly I don’t need Facebook to tell me What Decade I Am or Which TV Movie Lawyer I am or Who My Celebrity Boyfriend is or How Well I Know TV’s Matthew Perry. Nor do I want anybody to send me a Rhubarb plant and I do not wish to send a Rhubarb plant back to you. I don’t know the person Facebook tells me I should be friends with, and I don’t know most of the people who send me event invitations.

Yet there is something about Facebook that we all love, and I think it is because it gives us a peak into the lives of others without having to actually engage. It’s why Twitter is so popular, I suppose, even though the very idea of signing up for Twitter, at this moment, makes me want to climb a tree and refuse come down, kicking at the fireman who is trying to grab hold of my leg until they have to taser me down. (“OMG – just saw man get tasered out of a tree!! NYC is sooo cray-zeeeeeee!!”)

I do use Facebook, and I can assure you I am the first to click on any news story that contains “Paris Hilton” and “tweets about fall in toilet.” But I also know that I live without those sites, like those folks in Iran.

What I cannot live without, I have to tell you and I am ashamed to admit, is “Daisy of Love.”

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Public Profile

By Conor | June 10th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

We write about what we know, and at the moment, I know a lot about three month old babies. Or at least I know more than I did three months ago.

I realize that there are a lot of people out there, girl people, who really like babies. For me, there was little to get excited about until I had one of my own. To wit, this is a direct quote from a blog entry of mine from January 2006:
[New parents] believe that when they meet a friend, there is nothing more important in this world than relating the fact that their child pointed at a bush for the first time. The friend could be standing in the path of a speeding dump truck, the driver could be waving madly that he has no brakes, but that parent will still have to squeeze in the fact that Baby “ate-almost-an-entire-bowl-of-peas-this-morning-LOOK OUT!”

I am now that guy.

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First Born Son

By Conor | May 31st, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Liz and I have a son. His name is Finn; he is wonderful. We are madly in love with him. I am using the term “madly in love” here as a way of showing the lengths I am willing to go to illustrate how much I care for this child.

In any other circumstances, you see, the term “madly in love” is, for me, utterly unusable. In the past when I have heard parents use it to describe their feelings for their newborns I would, if I was feeling generous, merely roll my eyes. That’s because it always reminds me of a kind of dramatic proclamation that goes beyond the reasonable. “Madly in love?” Really? You will find the phrase in Jane Austin adaptations where Kate Winslet (who else plays these roles?) will burst into her mother’s bedroom in a flowing nightgown and cry, in an English accent, “I met him last night at the Wickersham’s Ball, Mother! His name is Philip and we are madly in love! We marry Friday week!”

We are not madly in love like that. But we are crazy about this boy and we love him to death. I’m going to tell you more about him now.
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