Like I told @jigg, the emasculation of the married man is now complete since momaroo decided to post my stuff (twice).  Maybe I'll write about the pros and cons of bottle feeding next.  Ha!  Just kidding...thanks for the aloha, momaroo!

There are four possible apices in every man's life:

• Hot Bachelor
• Hot Husband
• Hot Dad
• Hot Cuddly Grandpa (because being a hot grandpa sounds creepy in a lecherous Woody Allen sort of way)

I knew from early on--intermediate school, when I was assigned to play the tuba instead of the drums--that I would never attain hot bachelor status.  While not necessarily repugnant, I resigned myself to the arena of unrequited love filled with other members of the aesthetic middle class, and had to rely on other schemes in order to get a wahine to marry me.  In the rare occasion that she will talk about it, my wife will say that one of the things that made me stand out amongst a crowd of otherwise richer and handsome-er-er suitors was my writing (emails, no blogging back then).  And there have been times when my wife would point to me in mid-warble at karaoke and say to her friends, "this is why I married him!"  (While not Josh Groban, I can sell it pretty well.)  So in the end, not being the hot bachelor worked out.

Hot husband?  While many women secretly fatten up their husbands so that they would be anathema to any succubus passing by, others want their husbands to be trophy hot, either to boost their self esteem or show the hand to their frenemies.  (The rest?  They love their husbands as they are!)  While my wife was neither, she did make a lot of, ahem, "improvements" by changing my wardrobe and pushing me to get more fit.  I never attained hot husband status as I was too lazy to put in enough work at the gym, but it was never a goal of mine.

Now hot dad?  Double decka hecka yeah I want to be that.  (You can be sure when I see the Beckhams on TV I'm checking out Becks, not Posh.)  I remember a couple years back sitting on my fat okole in the Planet Hollywood mall eating an ice cream cone waiting for my wife when I saw this guy who looked like he was ripped off the cover of the Armani catalog with his ripped biceps, stylish clothes and 5 o'clock shadow...pushing a stroller.  I remember thinking, "duuuude, that guy is hot, I want to be him."  And now that I really am a father?  Still want it.  Who wouldn't?  As fathers, we all desire to be heroes to our sons.  (I'm not trying to be sexist and speak only of the father-son relationship, but I can't write about daughters because I don't have one...yet!)  We want them to look up at us, admire us, respect us, and--whether we like to admit it or not--become just like us one day (or better than us, if you're a tiger parent).  This is why we help them with their homework, lecture them on the physics of shooting a basketball and everything else that being a father calls for.

The problem that is engendered with this panacea of parenthood is that in the effort to be the Batman to our little Robin, we cultivate an aura of infallibility, an impenetrable barrier of patriarchal hubris.  You see, the issue with being on the cover of a fashion magazine is that there is no room for imperfection.  Your hair must be impeccable.  Your clothes immaculate. Your face sans wrinkles.  Everything short of perfection is airbrushed away.

One of my pet peeves of the parent-child relationship is when parents are wrong but airbrush it away by saying, "it doesn't matter whether I am wrong or not, I am your father, so whatever I say is right."  I would never use that kind of reasoning with my wife or anyone at work who takes orders from myself.  So if we do not operate this way with other adults, why should we model this type of behavior to our children?  The first lesson we teach our children about love is that we love them dearly despite imperfection, because that is the only way to love someone.  And I think a good way to start that lesson is by acknowledging that we are imperfect ourselves.  That way we can grow together instead of apart.  That way he can confide in me because everywhere he is at, I have already been.

I want to be a hot dad.  Who doesn't?   But hot in a way that means my son can use me not only as a role model for health, fitness and academics, but also as a role model who is humble, gracious and capable of recognizing and asking for forgiveness when he is wrong.  I want him to know that it is okay to admit failure, because that is the only way you can come back and kick said failure in the okole the next time around.  I want to be a hero to my son.  But I want him to know that it's okay for your heroes to bleed and that we will bleed together, as long as God grants me whatever blessed time we have together on this earth.

The older I get, the more I yearn for the music of my youth.  So recently I've been playing a lot of the melancholious Brit invasion (nineties version) and eighties cheese on my iPod and youtubing real hip hop (Mobb Deep, old Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, KRS-One) instead of tuning into the manufactured, aural Jevity that masquerades as radio these days.  Now I know what the hippies felt like during the Reagan Administration when they were reminiscing about the seventies, although I would say that my recollection of my own respective era is still lucid and not clouded by too many brownies and bad trips.  (And for those of you born after MTV, no, I'm not talking about Duncan Hines or staying at a hotel that doesn't have WiFi.)  And I never had to cut my hair just to get a job.

Anyway.

So one of the common themes is this notion of living forever, usually as part of an undeliverable promise delivered in ode form by a paramour to his wouldbe courtesan.  Think "Live Forever" by Oasis and "Glory of Love" by Peter Cetera.  Can we live forever?  Of course not (at least not in the forms that we currently inhabit).  So I always chalked it up to all the other empty promises that boys who love girls who don't love them back make.  But now that I'm a father, I'm starting to think that maybe those shaggy haired dudes were right after all.

Any old time readers (HOLLA at yo boy!) know that I started this blog years ago to help navigate my existential morass after my dad died and to this day I still miss him terribly.  But as time goes by I find myself acting more like him in mannerisms and catch myself mouthing off the same neologisms and truisms.  Recently I have taken to telling my wife, "we made a beautiful boy!" every time I watch him sleep or smile back at me.  I was telling her the other day that our son is the flesh-and-blood manifestation of our marriage, the only thing in this world that is truly half her and half me.  I tell him in words he cannot understand yet that everything I have worked for in this life is now in him.  And in the same way I realized that all my parents' hopes, dreams, toils and victories are in me.  Though my father has passed on, part of him is still alive in me when I look in the mirror and in the way I live my life.

My wife often asks what my hopes are for my son.  Initially I would give the usual Tiger Parent answers but have recently changed my tune.  If my son has Jeremy Lin basketball skills, drop dead gorgeous looks (certainly not from me), is at least 6' tall (certainly from me) and changes the world, great.  But what I really hope is for him to be healthy and above all else to be a good man who loves his family, like the man my father was and the man that I am trying to be. 

All fathers think that their son is the smartest, most handsome boy in the world.  We cannot all be right, but we are right for our sons.  You do not love your son so he will love you back.  You love him so he will love his own son in the future.  That is how we live forever.

Little Man is 100 days old now!  (Pic is a couple weeks old.)