Dos Toros vs. Chipotle

I stumbled into a Dos Toros restaurant today. What I found was a little surprising.

Backstory
I work in an independent school that has a lot of things going for it (terrific people, very advanced technology program, cool location in the East Village). It’s hard to top the food though, especially because, as a faculty member, I eat for free every day. Seriously, the food is incredible. No good ol’ fashioned meat slop like I had growing up in a small-town public school. Everything is homemade, including the salad dressings and salsa (which our Chef just bottled and put in stores), and there are incredible things like pesto pizza, eggplant ravioli with pomodoro sauce, asparagus and goat cheese quiche, and bbq pulled pork with hushpuppies. And we were recently certified as a 2 star green restaurant.

It’s seriously good eatin’.

The only downside is when the school is closed, and thus the cafeteria, I’m left to fend for myself. Overwhelmed with the solid options in the neighborhood today, I asked a coworker where I should eat, and she said to try Dos Toros, so off I went.

The sign outside said “Taqueria,” so I envisioned one of the 63 tiny taco shops I frequented during my Southern California days. Everything delicious and handmade to order. Only 3 chairs to sit in and at least one of them wobbling on three legs. A 30 year old Horchata machine. A TV playing soccer or “Lo Que La Vida Me Robó” (my favorite Unisíon telenovela).

What I found though, was basically Chipotle with different signs. From the menu to the ordering process to the way your food is packaged it’s hard to tell them apart. Seriously, the McCafe I once visited in San Jose, Costa Rica was more different from a USA McDonald’s than Dos Toros and Chipotle seem to be. So I decided, in the style of the New York Times Magazine’s “Compare and Contrast”, to have a taco-off to ultimately decide which establishment is superior.

I’ve picked some arbitrary categories and decided these entirely subjective opinions will form the basis for this crucial competition. Here goes:

Compare and Contrast Dos Toros (near Union Square) vs. Chipotle (on St. Mark’s)
Dos Toros	Category	Chipotle
One of the best you’ll find in NYC	Guacamole	Not bad, if you’re in Kansas
It’s rare I have to brush salt off of anything	Saltiness of Chips	The porridge that’s just right
Surprisingly, just like the real thing	Carnitas	You know, not the worst
The green one is especially tasty	Salsas	Roasted Chili-Corn is my favorite part of any meal
Not too much, which is fine, unless you’re drinking	Amount of Food	Belly busting burrito bowls
$3.50 for chips & guac???	Price	Vegetarian costs the same as the meat option???
2 guys from Berkley who miss good tacos	Backstory	1 guy from Colorado and a another guy from a farm in Iowa
Well, they haven’t been Super Sized	Chain-yness	Grew from 14 stores to 500+ when McDonald’s owned 90% of the business
All 11 seats are usually taken	Seating	Cold and metallic, but there’s lots of it
“Our Focus on Food is Obsessive”	Do-Goodery Slogan	“Food With Integrity”
Winner: Dos Toros, but mostly because I feel less like an old, corporate sell-out when I’m there, and because, well, I think we all knew the answer after the Guacamole category.

Do They Need a Panic Button?

An article today in the NYT Sunday Business section talked about some of the newest technology that parents can use to track the whereabouts of young children. This isn’t something I’ve ever thought about pre-dadhood or since, so my interest was piqued.

These new products, some which aren’t even on the market yet, are watches that give parents various options for keeping tabs on little Timmy. According to the article, they are an improvement on the GPS trackers parents have been putting in backpacks (BTW, did you know parents were doing this because i sure didn’t) because they give the kids some enhanced features.

Not only do these slick watches make Timmy look like a little Upper East Side baller while he plays in a West End park, but they have a Panic Button that Timmy can press when he’s lost, or being bullied, or being stalked by a creepshow in a Planet of the Apes costume. If Timmy faces any of these untoward situations, he holds the panic button for 3 seconds and the 5 numbers saved in his phone are automatically dialed until someone answers. The watch also starts recording ambient sound.

Seems like the only thing this watch is missing is a sweet laser.

In a world where kids are getting snatched off the street and forced into indentured servitude on a regular basis, this watch seems like a must have. It’s just that, I don’t think this is happening so much.

Briefly mentioned in the article is this point – child abductions/kidnappings by strangers are incredibly uncommon. I looked it up on the Google Machine and found that depending on who you ask the numbers vary org to org, but they mostly agree that the scenario most of us think about when we think kidnapping – i.e. stranger abducts child while walking home from school – accounts for less than 1% of all kidnappings annually, and further that 50% of those kids make it home.

Statistically, Timmy is more likely to be abducted by one of those 5 people whose phone numbers you put in his sweet laser tracking watch. This doesn’t mean that kidnapping isn’t a serious problem. The anguish of having a child vanish is unimaginable to me, so we should all read up on the problem of kidnapping/abduction.

However, it seems pretty obvious to me that we can do a lot more to keep our kids safe by teaching them skills and tools for navigating the world rather than keep them at the end of a digital leash.

Parenting with every potential doomsday experience in mind is really unmanageable. Most of us are going to know that there are some risks that we can’t mitigate completely, but there are many that we can. However, it feels pretty easy to throw statistics out the window when it comes to my sweet little boy. There is no single place where each of us draws a line for what we’re going to obsess about and what we’re going to try and push out of our minds.

I think what’s really at the heart of a decision about placing GPS trackers on our kids is a question of how and where do we want technology to intersect our lives. It would be pretty difficult to make the case that technology hasn’t made life a lot better and easier in a myriad of ways. Like everything, though, technology has its limits in terms of what it can offer to improve life.

Having just started thinking of this topic this morning, I really don’t know where my line will be on this issue. My kid is just 8 months old and is almost exclusively with one or both of his parents all the time. He is starting to toddle though, and we’re pretty sure he’s going to be a runner, which means this is something we need to start thinking about.

Other dads (or moms), what do you think? Is the tracker just extreme helicopter parenting and detrimental to teaching our kids important life skills or in a world full of crazies, especially if you live in a big city like we do, you can never be too safe so let’s use any tool we can to protect our little people? To track or not to track…

 

After the Crowds

Last night the little guy attended his first Halloween Parade… with mixed results.

First things first – he was a soccer referee flanked by his soccer player parents. Essentially, he calls all the shots in our lives these days like when the day starts (4:30am kickoff today), how we play (recently, it’s the hold my hands while I walk around game, regardless how tired you are after work), and when he’s had enough of something (I think we all know his cry/yell is just as powerful as a whistle).

With his yellow and red cards pinned to his shirt, ref’s whistle around his neck, and soccer ball in hand we went to the neighborhood parade. It’s a neighborhood event where any family can show up at 5:45pm and march down the street to Fort Tryon Park where there was some kind of drum circle, dancing, and revelry. If you don’t mind a million kids running everywhere, parents who are drinking booze out a plastic cup, and having to walk slower than a toddler in slippers on an ice rink, it’s a terrific time.

At first, the kid seemed intrigued by all the people and music and being out of the apartment after dark (as the NYT said this morning, the Season of Darkness is Upon Us). We saw some friends, tried in vain to take some decent pictures, and walked to the park, but we weren’t there long before the little man became fussy. We tried to stick it out for a bit, but he was started to really get into one of those moods where, as a parent, you say to your nonverbal child, “Oh, please, just don’t go full-on Level 5 Chernobyl in public. We’ll go home. We’ll go home!”

So we headed home and figured we were in for a grumpy kid and a rough time getting him to bed, but when we got home, the kid’s demeanor totally changed. Away went the crying for no reason and back came big smiles and laughing. We were surprised.

After all the people and noise and creepshows hiding in bushes trying to scare kids (seriously, the event organizers should look into a “No hiding in the bushes in a Planet of the Apes costume and scaring children you don’t know policy”), I was ready to go home. That being home feeling is the best after a long day at work and an event like this, but I didn’t think that the kid would feel the same thing.

And I didn’t know it would make me feel so good to know he feels so happy in our home.

The preparation for a holiday like Halloween can be pretty fun, even if stressful. The running around finding costume stuff at the last minute. The yelling “hi” across a sea of strangers at your friends and trying to figure out what they’re trying to tell you with totally strange hand signs. The 300 outtakes you have trying to get one damn picture for a possible Christmas Card. It’s all great in an odd way.

But none of it compares to being home after it’s all over with a happy baby, happy wife… and a little bourbon.

Doesn’t Halloween Bring Out the Best in People?

So, this terrible thing happened over the weekend. It’s another example of the dehumanizing of individuals and groups of people that seem to pop-up every 365. This particular incident though feels even more insulting and degrading than the annual black-face, illegal alien, and china man (yep, apparently people are still using that slur) costumes.

This is a new blog about being a dad, and i’m already posting about something related to Trayvon Martin for the second time (Here’s what I said the first time). In a culture that has fully embraced the 24-hour news cycle’s short attention, the desire to write about this struck me as  pretty revealing. I think the sad story of Trayvon keeps coming up for me, and for so many of us, because we are all very unsettled about how we feel, think, talk, and act with regard to race.

I know that, as a dad, I am unsure of how to raise a white son with white parents in a white world to recognize the privilege he was born in to, to love himself, and to know the whole thing isn’t fair.

I can’t even begin to communicate the shame and disappointment I would feel if he grew up thinking white superiority was anything but the ugliest face of American past and present, but I also don’t want him to grow up believing that the choices of others who came before him or who are around him now define his character. I want him to know that his choices are what will define him.

And as a dad I have some hopes for those choices…

I hope his choices are grounded in a self-awareness that acknowledges that his social position isn’t a reflection of his relative value as a person and that it differs from so many others.

I hope that he recognizes that his experience in the world includes that which is entirely unique to him and also that which is shared, similar, and connected to others.

I hope he chooses to be an ally. An ally who has genuine compassion and concern for people, who learns when he needs to raise his voice and when he needs to give others space to raise theirs.

Lastly, I hope that he realizes that there are some choices he can make, like whether to be an ally, that others can’t make, and,at the core, that is what make this conversation about race (or gender, or class, or identity, need i continue?) so difficult. It’s hard to be an ally, and there are moments when you want to step away and just not worry about it, but that is a choice that only some of us can make.

How do I raise my son become this person? I’m still trying to figure that out, but I think it starts by talking about real things that happen… like the choice to wear the costumes above, and more, the unabashed support for this choice by a lot of people (there is a lot that needs be said about the bullying, shaming, and intimidating that happens behind the sometimes anonymous veil of the internet).

So… here I am saying to my son (who can’t read yet, but will hopefully see this someday) and my friends and my family, this isn’t ok, and dressing up in this way isn’t a joke or a prank and it certainly isn’t funny.

As dads we are in a critical position to talk with our kids about how important our choices are, including about how costumes can matter. Plus, Halloween doesn’t need to be filled with hate and bigotry. It can be full of laughter, fun and even cuteness… like this little Vampire Tiger.

New Rules

It turns out that blogging is a really tough task when you’re working full-time, trying to do your part around the apartment, and spending as much time as possible with your 7-month old. What makes it hard is less about finding time than it is about mustering up the mental energy.

When I first decided to start a blog about being a dad I was really excited about the possibilities. I love writing. I love being a dad. I love giving my opinion on stuff. It seemed like blogging would fall right into the sweet spot of the Venn Diagram of stuff i love.

What actually happened was the opposite, and, because i love to give my opinion on stuff (we just covered this), i’m going to tell you why.

First, I love writing. I do it professionally and have for awhile. I’ve written as a journalist, as a grad student, as a web designer, as a shameless promoter of social programs. A big part of my current job is to help people learn how to improve the way they write as a way of improving our organization’s communications. All of this experience writing though didn’t make it easier to write when I get home. It makes it harder, because I want everything to be perfect… and funny… and witty. But after getting up at 5:30am with an excited baby that wants to play, I’m way too excited by 9pm to be clever. At that point I really only have the mental energy for two fingers of a great bourbon (neat, of course) and reruns of 30 Rock.

Second, I love being a dad. I hate that during the work week, I only get to see my little Googamoo for 30 minutes in the morning before work, and on average 2 hours before bed. This is really the simplest point of the three – I really just don’t want to give up any of that brief time for, well, anything.

Third, I love giving my opinion on stuff. When I thought about starting this blog, I figured I would share some funny stories and a few hilarious pictures of my really expressive, and likely to be mischievous, kid. Mostly though, I figured I would draw from my experience as a dad to make large points and ask tough rhetorical questions about society and fatherhood. Turns out this is more difficult than I expected. In those times where I did find the mental energy and time to write, I found it is incredibly hard to put down the experience of trying to be a great dad in an honest way while also connecting it to dads everywhere. Plus, blogs have the mystical power of making a person feel like they have ancient wisdom to share and by not doing so is letting down humanity. I may have been overestimating my abilities in that regard…

For awhile all this just meant I had this brief blog that hadn’t been updated in a pretty long time. I’ve decided to change that by giving myself a break and modifying my expectations a little. So, not that anyone is really concerned but me, here are some new rules, for myself, with regard to this blog:

1-No pressure to be witty, clever, funny, or even interesting. Have something you want to say, just go right ahead. You’re not Hemingway after all.

2-Don’t blog if it means spending less time with your kid… and feel really good about that.

3-Shed any thoughts about being useful to other dads. Their experience is theirs and yours is yours. Give an opinion for the therapeutic process of thinking things through, but be ok with blogging being only that. Plus, every dad is better off experiencing things for themselves, not that i’m telling you other dads what to think here.

Hopefully, this all means that there will be more posts soon. Not that it matters to you, friendly reader, because I am now blogging for me. and for my son, in that, hopefully this process will make me a better dad. Plus, if I actually keep at this awhile, he may get a kick out of reading on his hologram watch while he’s riding his personal space pod in 30 years.

Fellow Dads Let’s Talk

I decided to start this blog about the day George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. To be clear, this isn’t a blog about politics or current events. It’s a blog about being a dad.

The first thing I thought when my wife got the NY Times alert on her phone about this verdict was, “How do you talk to your kid about something like this?” This was a moment when reality came down hard and showed me that difficult waters lie ahead.

My life has been full of people who love me. I have a mother who has basically given her entire life for the past 33 years to care for me and my brother. I have had grandparents and aunts/uncles who’ve done more for me than anyone could ask. I’ve had Little League coaches, ministers, professors, and so many more people offer guidance, wisdom, support… even money when i needed it most.

I haven’t had a dad though.

I don’t know how my life would be different if I’d had a father all these years. What I do know is that I’m petrified that I’m going to screw something up for my son because I may not know how to do this dad thing right.

I may be too tender to help him get back on his feet when he’s been knocked down because I’m worried he won’t feel loved. Maybe I’ll be too tough when he’s hurting because I’m worried I’ll be too tender. Perhaps I’ll be too strict with his schooling because I was such slacker as a kid. I could get too focused on my job and miss talking with him about something really important, whether it’s somebody that broke his heart or a moment that affected people around our country.

As I’ve been talking with other fairly new dads in my life I’ve realized one key thing–we’re all scared. Those like me without dads, or very good ones, are all worried they won’t know what to do because no one did it for them. Those that had terrific dads are scared that they couldn’t possibly live up to the incredible model they had.

So, damn. What’s a new dad to do? In my case, I decided the answer was blog. There are some really good sites out there about dadhood. But can there every really be enough people writing and talking about what it takes to be the best possible dad in 2013?

So I’m going to blog. And there’s a good chance I’ll only be followed by my Mom (I mentioned how great she is, right?) and my wife (she’ll knows I’ll just talk about it so she might as well read it) and a couple of friends who are addicted to the interwebs (thanks guys, but you should really go outside a little more).

Most of what I’ll write about will be stuff that 1-amuses me, 2-confuses me, and 3-excites me about being a dad. Sometimes it’ll just be a moment that’s too good to keep to myself and sometimes it’ll be big stuff that I think we’ll all be better dads if we talk about it.

When it comes to George Zimmerman I’ve figured out that I would tell my son three things. First and foremost, it is a tragedy that someone lost their life. Regardless of guilt, innocence, or responsibility, there are now parents who will spend the rest of their life thinking about a lost child – I can’t even begin to fathom that.

Second, there are a lot of people that feel personally connected to this tragedy. I think we should ask ourselves why. Without taking sides, I think this is an exercise in empathy and love that we can do to try and understand how a single event can rile such strong emotions in various communities. I think there are important lessons there.

Third, I would ask what we’re doing to prevent this from happening again. Possibly the saddest part of all of this is that Trayvon isn’t an anomaly. He’s one of thousands of people who lose their lives to gun violence each year. This is a complicated problems whose solution lies somewhere in the intersection of race, civil liberties, politics, and our laws. The best way to prevent this is to get involved in what is happening at every level in your community.

I hope that this blog encourages conversations among dads about important things we need to wrestle with for the sake of our kids. I also hope it provides space to tell you about my amazing kid who just this week started to sit up by himself, ate his first solid food (avocado!), and stuck his toes in the ocean for the first time.

So, fellow dads, let’s talk.

America’s Pastime

Baseball is commonly known as America’s pastime, but i think we should considering hanging out with your kids to be the next great thing. And when you can do it at a baseball game, even better.