that moment when ur doge

such doge

much homework

very stress

must scroll

Like most internet memes, I was completely unaware of the Doge meme iceberg, while being slightly annoyed by the tiny bit that my sons kept mentioning.  

A couple of years back, every time we passed a smallish, beige-ish dog, we would have to avidly discuss whether that was a ‘doge’ or not. It was finally made clear to me that a doge was a Shiba Inu...maybe.  But why was this so so compelling and important?

Again, like all things internet meme, I have read the exhaustive history, but am still sort of befuddled on the real why beyond the obvious “dogs are funny” and “it is amusing to imagine that they speak pidgin English.”

To attempt a brief summary of some bullet points from @knowyourmeme:

🐕The use of the term ‘doge’ for dog dates back to a 2005 puppet show video

🐕Pictures of a particular Shiba Inu were posted on a personal blog by @kabosumama (her present handle on instagram) back in 2010. 

🐕The meme spread in various forms and various dogs on Tumblr, Reddit and 4chan from 2010 onwards

🐕In 2013, YouTube inserted a feature that shifted text to brightly colored comic sans font when the search term ‘doge meme’ was used. Many of the doge images feature short words and pidgin phrases superimposed like ‘wow,’ ‘so hip,’ ‘very internet meme,’ ‘such wisdom.’

🐕Reports of the original doge’s death in 2017 were a hoax, but were very popular, and no doubt increased the meme’s popularity.

🐕Also in 2017, Dogecoin was introduced as a satirical cryptocurrency. At its height, one Dogecoin was worth $400.80. At last report, they are worth $0.00322634 each. 

🐕Enough?

For our part, we have a bit of a history with dogs’ heads on children. (Take that face recognition software.)

And the classic side-eye doge expression seemed appropriate for “That Moment When Your Mom Sees You Scrolling When You Should Be Doing Homework.’

Nerf Dogs

We survived the birthday party melee.
Although we will be retrieving foam darts from corners of our apartment, probably until we move or they take me away to the long term care facility.

The napkin does not at all capture the nature of the situation. Way too calm, organized and quiet.
My son was also disappointed that this napkin did not feature specific, identifiable kids.

The guns had to be specific and identifiable. I knew that, but I shirked on the kid part, I admit it.
I had previously set the bar too high by drawing his friends in the school cafeteria as specific recognizable dogs.  This had resulted in endless bickering over who got to be which dog.

I'll admit, I was more distracted here by just getting several guns in the picture and not having my half-assed perspective be too distracting.  And I did not want to fight over who got to be a pug again.

Links to some other kids-with-dog-heads napkins below, where I paid more attention to who was which canine... but there were no guns or living rooms to draw.

Pug in YOLO Cap Poses in Front of Mr. Robot Poster

YAOYO: You're only young once. 

But you can always be a Pug.

There is a yearly summer event in our Brooklyn neighborhood called the Giglio Feast in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The celebration hails from a small town in Italy where most of the area's original inhabitant emigrated from. (Now they have been replaced by hipsters with parents wealthy enough to cosign their condominium mortgages.) 

The Feast includes engaging cultural elements like an enormous saint-encrusted totem which is danced down the street on the shoulders of a crowd of red hatted Italian men. 

In addition to the charming cultural event, it's also just a standard New York City carnival replete with the usual potentially intestine-devastating food, overpriced rides that have clearly seen better days, fixed games, and merchants of mostly reflective junk. 

Our kids have always loved going to the Feast, and start clamoring to be taken as soon as they see the trailers arrive for set up at the beginning of July. Before it has even opened, they are arguing that we should visit multiple times this year. It always seems that last year they did not get enough opportunities to win a dirty stuffed animal with twenty dollars worth of ping pong ball tossing, dart throwing, or water pistol squirting. 

Let me be honest, just in case it is not already clear. I don't like the carnival aspect of the Feast for many of the obvious reasons. My most significant gripe, however, is that I really do not enjoy my interactions with the carnival workers (is the term "carnie" considered derogatory? Or am I confusing it with other "y"/"ie" ending slangy descriptions of people?) 

The endless shouting at "Mommy"  to throw money away on my children's behalf somehow bothers me more than it should. Not to mention the intense pressuring that is rolled out should we actually stop in front of any game to consider it.

But, let me wrap this up quickly as you are certainly wondering what this has to do with a pug wearing a hat... Suffice it to say that the problem was easily solved this year, possibly never to return.

I decided that the kids were definitely old enough to manage their own currency this time. I made this assessment despite the fact that they are not good in crowds and are also remarkably poor at holding onto paper money in a discrete fashion. I thought it likely that the cash would be taken off of them before they even had a chance to spend it, but decided it was well worth the risk.

On the way over, I handed them each some bills and explained they could spend it however they wished, but that there would be no more forthcoming. 

Actually holding the money themselves instantly sucked all of the joy out of the carnival for them. Suddenly, they concluded that the food and the rides were overpriced, and that the games were a waste of money because they were fixed. 

Of course, I had been making this argument for years, but had been unpersuasive when the money seemed to be coming out of (to their minds) a potentially endless fount in mom's backpack. 

They did each play the try to toss the ball into a bucket game once because the supposed prize was a PlayStation 4 and that was too entrancing to completely bypass. Mysteriously, it was ever so easy to put the ball in the bucket during the "demonstration throw" but then totally impossible to keep it from bouncing back out when they were playing for the actual prize. In the past, they never believed me when I told them that this game in particular was obviously fixed. But this year, they were convinced after spending only $5.

And the game operators were much less obnoxious about trying to take money directly away from children, so the whole experience was much less stressful for me.

Less fun for the kids of course.

But I feel I've done my job as a parent when I've managed to suck the joy out of something for my kids. Just kidding.

They did not, however, take the remaining cash home and put it into their college fund. They pooled their remaining bills and bought the silly "YOLO" hat ("you only live once"- if that needs explanation) for the younger kid. 

On the way to camp wearing the hat, he posed in front of the Christian Slater poster on the subway platform. It seemed like a napkin worthy juxtaposition....as long as his face was replaced by that of a pug.

Dogs Playing Foosball

Never underestimate the appeal of Foosball....or of dogs.

Our younger son's school is in temporary quarters for the rest of the year, so amenities are rather limited, and the recreation space is a somewhat bare and gloomy basement.

But they do have a Foosball table, and that seems to be more than enough. Whenever I arrive for pickup, there is a large excited group of kids hopping up and down around the Foosball table. We often have to stick around for as long as possible so as not to miss any critical Foosball action.

I drew less kids on this napkin than are usually involved in the game, as I could only put so many dog heads together on short notice. My son was very concerned about which kid was which canine, but as this drawing was based on a concoction of several snapshots, I can't say that I chose the dog breeds based on the individual kids' personalities.

For the sake of full disclosure, and since he asked me repeatedly, my son is the second from the left. He says I made him look fat, but I disagree.

Speaking of the appeal of Foosball and dogs...I had to sit through the preview for "The Underdogs" movie multiple times last year, but now I see that after many reschedulings, its US release has been cancelled... My sons were very positive about the possibility of seeing a movie about Foosball table characters magically come to life in order to play soccer, but I lost patience after repeated viewings of the preview. Wikipedia tells me that this movie set the all time record for the box office opening of an Argentine film, but perhaps the appeal of Foosball was not enough to insure its distribution in the States.

(See a similar napkin from last year, "Cafeteria Dogs" at this link. I was able to be more thoughtful about dog breed choice in that case.)

Cafeteria Dogs

No cigars were smoked during the making of this picture.

The boys were photogenically arranged around a table in the cafeteria last Friday morning, playing with some Harry Potter cards. Earlier in the week, I had turned a bunch of snapshots into a napkin with kids with animal heads. So when I took a few pictures on Friday, my son told his friends that I was probably going to make a drawing of them with funny heads. That seemed like a request of a sort to me.  Later, he and I talked about replacing their heads with those of superheroes. Though I wouldn't rule that out for a future image, I have to admit that  I was daunted by the prospect of having to choose who got to be Batman.

After looking at the snapshots, the mother of the Golden Retriever on the napkin above emailed helpfully:
 "Dogs and cigars, Nina."
Once I had been reminded of poker playing dogs, I could not resist turning all the boys into various canines.

(Apparently the above "classic" 1903 painting of dogs playing poker by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was part of a pair that sold for almost $600,000 back in 2005.)

I still had to make all those hard decisions about who was going to be which breed.  After lengthy consideration, my son picked out a Basenji for himself. I did the best that I could with the others.

I'm sure I will hear some criticism about my choices on Monday morning.

Cafeteria Animals

Who gets to be the fox?:
The cool guys hang out in the cafeteria before school.

Our younger son was using a photo app yesterday to put Panda face "stickers" on photos.  I gather there are several of these apps like Animal Face by Easy Tiger with various animals to choose from.

Before he went to bed last night, he had told me, "No more animal napkins, Mom! No more Pugs, and definitely no more Unicorns." But he did not have any requests for today's napkin, and sometimes, like my sons, I find negative direction hard to follow.

There are three classes within each grade at our kids' school, and this year all of my son's friends were assigned to one class without him.  He only gets to see them for the 15 or 20 minutes after we drop off his older brother and before the beginning of his school day.  This time is spent hanging out in the cafeteria and the surrounding hallways, getting away with as much rowdy and slightly nefarious behavior as possible.  On the somewhat rare occasions when the boys are sitting at a table together rather than running around or lurking in the bathroom, I try, often unsuccessfully, to get away with taking pictures of them.

Last night I used some of these snapshots as the basis for the animal head replacements in today's napkin.  I gave careful consideration to which animal head went with which boy... yes, these are the important thoughts that I am thinking late at night when I should be sleeping... My son's favorite animal is the Red Panda, so that was an obvious choice. The Fox went to a friend who is partial to wearing blingy metallic necklaces and gold high-tops. After the advent of Marvel's Rocket character,  a Raccoon face seemed like a safe bet for another friend.  And, well, someone had to be a Panda, so that went to a boy who had recently annoyed my son by spying on him in the bathroom.

I was pretty sure that this napkin would irritate my son, particularly after the "no more animals" injuction last night. I showed him a picture of it on my phone this morning so that he would be forewarned before he uncorked it at lunch. While he told me that he did not like the way I had drawn his hand, ("I don't ever hold my hand like that!") he was surprisingly pleased with the picture and proudly showed it to the other three boys. The usually photo-adverse kids even tried to recreate the picture at the cafeteria table.

There was, predictably, some griping about my animal choices. The Panda was not so pleased, and Raccoon boy told me that I had better draw him as a Fox next time.

Our very tolerant sitter got the Panda treatment