Last week I had an informal meeting with my client and the other party along with their attorney to attempt to settle a divorce.  The meeting took place at opposing counsel’s office in Allegan and when I walked in he shook my hand and asked “how are you doing Jim?”  I thought maybe I misheard him but when we ended up meeting with all of us to make sure we were on the same page with what the parties had agreed to he also called me Jim.  At that point there was no going back, if I corrected him it would be way more awkward than being called the wrong name in front of my client so I just let it slide.  The troubling thing is that this wasn’t the first time I had had a case with this particular attorney, nor was it the first time I had been called the wrong name and just let it go.  This week I was riding up the elevator from the basement of our building and I bumped into the guy in charge of maintenance for our building, he addressed me as Justin, not my favorite name but still much better than his name which was Stuart.

Being referred to as Justin brought up a range of emotions for me.  My therapist and I had made a lot of progress working through the trauma’s of my child hood, but all that progress was for not when Stuart called me Justin.  When I was in ninth grade I played football for South Christian’s ninth grade team.  At the time ninth graders were not part of the high school so I typically would get a ride home with my buddies cousin who was the assistant coach.  He had a Fu Manchu mustache, tore the sleeves off his dress shirts and chewed tobacco.  The entire season he called me Justin and I never once corrected him.  For some reason I decided to play football the next year and had a coach who was even more intimidating than my ninth grade coach.  We were doing some type of drill and he wanted me to be more aggressive so he had me do the drill with him, somehow my helmet caught him in the face and made him start bleeding.  It was the only memorable thing I did all season.

I suppose I have no problem being called Jim or Justin because I have been called a lot worse by a lot of people.  Would it be nice to be called other J names instead of Jim or Justin?  Of course it would, but if someone called me Julius I may have to correct them, as much as I like the sound of Julius Jansma, there’s no way I can allow someone to call me that name without me and that person looking like a fool.

Being called the wrong name is just one of the many odd things that I have had going on lately.  I misplaced my credit card, Y membership card, metal water bottle, and a Jordan tank top and another nike basketball tank top in the span of the past month.  On top of that I thought I lost my North Face gloves and Oakley hat last week but they were actually in my overcoat.  (Nike, North Face, and Oakley are not sponsors of my blog but if they were some day that would be truly amazing, probably need to push the readership into the double digits though if I want that to happen).  Am I losing my mind, it definitely seems like it, which sadly isn’t replaceable once you lose it.  The biggest problem about losing things is that I typically am so upset about it that I purchase the exact same thing to replace it, which is kind of waste of resources.  On my flight back from Phoenix in early November I left my water bottle on the plane. I bought a new one immediately and the only difference was that my new one had a rubber bottom so when I fill it with the water dispenser on our fridge it holds its place and the water dispenses automatically instead of me having to hold on to my water bottle as it fills  (it’s only overflowed once). Saturday I let Aiden use my water bottle for his basketball game and thought to myself, I’m probably going to leave it at the gym, and sure as shit, I did.  I plan on going back to the school where I left it to see if it is in the lost and found, but that water bottle was and is awesome so I am guessing someone took it home with them.

Another strange thing that happened to me occurred this morning.  When I got back from basketball both of my kids were in the shower singing a Spanish song.  Why are they taking a shower in our shower?  Why are they showering together?  Why are they singing in Spanish?  Those are all good questions and if you knew Shirley you would have the answer to those questions.  I had no idea what Dame Tu Cosita means until Shirley showed me this video as the kids were having a grand old time in our shower.

For those of you who don’t feel like Googling the translation, it means give it to me, and Aiden told Shirley he knew the song has something  to do with your weiner, even though the green guy in the video has no Weiner.  After the kids had gotten out of the shower and were getting ready I heard Aiden say “her Vagina looks like a weiner”.  Where does he get this stuff?  I’d like to say he is picking it up at school but the lion’s share of the blame goes on his parents.  However, using the proper term, vagina, in my mind points to solid parenting.  Are we saying vagina on a frequent basis?  I don’t think we are, although Vagina is such a great word that you can say it and not even realize it, it just rolls right off the tongue so easily.  The problem actually can be attributed to You Tube, my kids love You Tube even more than they love singing Spanish songs in the shower and they frequently watch other people playing video games on You Tube amongst other things.  I don’t understand this, I don’t like playing video games let alone watching other people play video games.  Shirley thinks them watching other people play video games is where they pick most of the inappropriate talk up from.

Shirley finally lowered the boom this past weekend and told them no more You Tube.  You would have thought she told them we weren’t celebrating Christmas the way they reacted (Super Dave who unfortunately is my brother in law actually is taking this stance based upon his belief that Christmas is a pagan holiday, I think my sister should ban him from the internet entirely).   The problem with the Shirley imposed ban is that my kids are like a couple of cat burglars when it comes to electronic devices.  All of a sudden my phone is gone and guess who has it, my fricken kids that’s who, and they jump right on You Tube when they have possession of my phone.  I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard a whole lot of objectionable material when they are watching youtube in my car and it is piped through blue tooth, but the people playing the games have even less likelihood of having sex with another human being than the people who work at the Apple Store.  If I want my kids to ever have any luck with the ladies I need to also enforce Shirely’s You Tube ban.  On top of that, the kids alternative is either Captain Underpants or Atomic Puppet, which are both highly entertaining Netflix shows.  If given the choice being subjected to a bunch of virgin dorks play video game or listening to George Beard and Harold Hutchins, I’m taking George and Harold all day.  Well, it looks like I gotta go, time to try and claim that water bottle out of the lost and found at Forest Hills Middle school on my way to the Kuyper old man basketball lunch run.