Shulgan.com

Autumn 2013

Hi all! Welcome to my website. Which I'm not updating much these days. Most of the writing I do under my own name appears over at The Grid's parenting section, and most of the TV I do happens over at CBC's wonderful Steven and Chris show, and then the rest of my work involves ghostwriting op-eds, books, speeches and newsletters for a revolving cast of fascinating clients. The rest of the time I'm hanging out with Chantel Guertin and the two rugrats in the above photo. Thanks for visiting!

Nice things people have done for me lately

So I turned 40. The people I love did a bunch of really nice things for me in celebration, and I was trying to figure out a way to record it, and then I remembered I have a blog. Which I haven't updated for more than a year and a half. But if recording the events of your 40th birthday, and the nice things that people did for you on that occasion, isn't a good reason to update your blog, then I don't know what is. So let's get to it. 

The weekend before my actual birthday, my brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, my niece, my nephew, my mom, my dad, my girlfriend, my son, my daughter—everybody gathered in a chalet at Blue Mountain for a ski and snowboard weekend that included a birthday evening for me. A couple of funny things happened during the trip, which I'm going to chronicle for the next Superdad column I write in The Grid.

So this series of posts is about my immediate family, and what happened on my actual birthday. First off, my girlfriend and the kids began this campaign where they gave me a present a day for the 40 days leading up to my actual birthday. They were thoughtful little gifts. One day I got a can of Cherry Coke, another, a hot-air popcorn popper. Nice, right? Few things in life remind you how lucky you are than waking up to your boy and your girl's smiling faces bringing you a present they wrapped themselves, bought for you by your girlfriend—and I did that every day for 40 days. In the time leading up to the actual birthday friends and colleagues would be like, ooh, the big four-oh, how do you feel? Kind of wincing as they said it. And I'd be like, what? Are you kidding? It's awesome! I want to turn 40 every year!

But Channie and the kids were just getting started. She asked me, ages back, what I wanted to do on the Actual Day Of and I shrugged and said that I just wanted to hang out, the four of us together. My kids, my girlfriend, me. So when I woke on my birthday, Chantel handed me a little gift-wrapped box. The wrapping paper was the print that tops this post—I have a thing for matriushka dolls—and in it was the weekend's itinerary. Next up: What that entailed.

Parenting columnist for The Grid

In the long-overdue department, I should post here that I'm now contributing columns to Toronto's new weekly magazine, The Grid, as their parenting columnist.The latest one is about the 35th anniversary of OWL magazine, which I loved as a kid and recently discovered that I still love as an adult.

Check out that column, and others, here:

http://www.thegridto.com/life/parenting/

How I Lost My First Love (MothUp: Toronto)

The Jan. 31 rough draft deadline for the book I'm ghost-writing means I haven't had much time to write for the blog. Find fresh stuff by Shulgan at Eye Weekly's mini-site for my column, Superdad. And in the meantime, above, there's an account of me relating my most embarrassing moment, which still causes me to cringe even now, as I think of it.

Update to Book List

I have grown a little spotty about listing here the books I'm reading. For example, I'm reading my life's first parenting book, pictured above, which I'll review later on. For now, here's a list of what I've ploughed through since I made a point of reviewing here every book I've read.

23 (of 2010). View from the Summit by Edmund Hillary (research for a ghostwriting project)
24. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (Enjoyed this)
25. Death and Life on Mt. Everest by Sherry B. Ortner (research)
26. Lost Horizon by James Hilton (research)
27. Modern Medicine and International Aid: Khunde Hospital, Nepal, 1966-1998 by Susan Heydon
28. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission To Promote Peace... One School At A Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (research, but really enjoyed this book)
29. The Ask: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte (for fun, and really enjoyed it)
30. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (great book)
31. Freedom by Jonathon Franzen (had problems with it)
32. The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele (great book by a good friend)
33. Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci (wow, enjoyed this)
34. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (straight-up ghost story, super creepy)
35. Shella by Andrew Vachss (well-written pulp fiction, Auster-like in spareseness)
36. Growing Up Jung by Micah Toub (great book by a good friend)

A Request for the Laptop Zombies

I hang out with a bunch of writers and editors, many of whom work in solitary mode at their respective homes, many of whom most days are conducting ongoing conversation among us all through Twitter and Facebook. I wonder whether we'd all get more work done if we all convened at one place. If so, that place should definitely be the Lakeview. 

Photo from the photostream of phunkybrats.

Bamboletta Noel

I'd say I'm about 23% done my Christmas shopping, and I'm only five days away from my self-imposed deadline of Dec. 14. Crap. I would be 27% done except for the insane demand around these Bamboletta dolls I wrote about recently. They're handmade dolls sewn in British Columbia, and the woman who does them sells them exclusively online through her website, AND she only puts like two dozen available for sale at any one time. 

The last batch went onsale on Friday just as my wife had her online seminar tutorial thing, which for whatever boring reason requires her computer to be connected right into our modem, which means no one else can use our network, which means I had to head over to Ezra's Pound to try to snag one of the dolls. So I'm this grown man in a hipster coffee shop where the tables are so close to each other you're basically sitting on your tablemate's lap, and it was crowded, so the laptop zombies on either side of me were checking me out as I clicked through photo after photo of unconventional children's dolls. You could totally see the WTF thought bubbles floating above their heads.

The Bamboletta site said they'd post the dolls online between 3 and 3:30 p.m., EST, and so I started the clicking around precisely at the first moment they'd be available, and then kept at it, feeling progressively more silly as time passed. Why was it so important for me to get this doll? Well, really it wasn't. It was important for my wife. Why was it important for my wife? It had something to do with the dolls being handmade; the fact they were created in the spirit of love seemed to imbue the dolls with a special quality that made them appropriate for our daughter: a beautiful little girl for our beautiful little girl. And when I thought about it like that, getting one became important for me, too.

At 3:25 p.m. I refreshed my Firefox browser and the message "No dolls available, check back later," was replaced with this chart of doll pictures. How many? Maybe 20? I was too busy scrolling through to count. Hey, this is great. I was going to get one! Excited! But which one would be perfect for my daughter? At the bottom I found this:

 Clemantine! What a great name! And she had blue eyes and blond hair, just like my daughter, and actually doesn't Penny have a cardigan somewhat similar to the pink one the doll wears? And Penny loves pink. Awesome. I clicked on the link to get to this:

Oooh, now I felt a little jolt of adrenaline as I clicked on the "buy" button. Ah, shoot! There was a red bar at the top that said something like, "Another buyer is buying this doll." Back to the main page, I found another doll with blond hair, but brown eyes, "Leona," and, bang, same thing again. No! Damnit. So I went different. I found a doll with chocolate skin and cute kinked-out pigtails and clicked on her. Gah! No dice! Damnit! Now I just clicked indiscriminately, I went through anything, but darnit, everything was taken, now. All sold out. I'd missed my chance.

Later when I thought about it, about the strange swiftness with which the whole slate of dolls sold out, I wondered whether some Mark Zuckerburg-type had written a script that sucked up all the dolls at the same time. Later, a Bamboletta search on eBay revealed a half-dozen dolls going for hundreds of dollars over Bamboletta's asking price. And there was my daughter's Clemantine! A different version, but still:

And then check this out:

Holy?! It's selling for $825 US? Sheesh! No way I'm spending that. Even if she does have purple hair. Really cool looking purple hair. Well, a part of me is tempted. But no! We don't have anywhere near that money! Even the $180 the doll cost originally was pushing it! And oh, does that ever bug me, that some Internet pirate is making money from something I could have bought!

But actually there's a bit of a happy ending to all this. The day after so many Bamboletta dolls were placed on eBay by evil Mark Zuckerberg Internet pirates, the Bamboletta owner, Christina, wrote a blog post explaining how she reconsidered her decision to sell the dolls by Internet auction. (Quick take: Before she thought it was evil to charge like $400 for dolls, but since other people are doing it, she'll do it, and give the extra money directly to her employees as a kind of Christmas bonus.)

So rather than all that surplus demand getting exploited to line the pockets of Internet pirates, it's going to nice British Columbia sewers. Which makes me feel a bit better.

The Spa Weekend

My latest Superdad column posted today over at Eye Weekly:

The key to keeping a marriage fresh, I’d read, involved conducting new experiences together. The spa qualified as an experience. Beautiful place, nice people, but I felt very exposed in that waiting room, perhaps because I was the only male in the place, or maybe because I actually was exposed: the robe seemed sized for a woman and when I sat down, it hiked up to about mid-thigh. Then my wife patted me on the shoulder. “Sometimes after a facial your face doesn’t end up looking very good,” she said, in the whisper that seems to be de rigueur in spa waiting rooms. “You come out looking all red and puffy.”

“What?” I said, losing the whisper. “Why?” More...

How To Host A Kids' Birthday Party

My nephew's fifth birthday party was this past weekend, and from it I learned several lessons about making kids' birthday parties something better than soul-killing boredom, a.k.a. awesome. The first lesson was, switch it up. In this case, my brother and sister-in-law set the birthday at High Park and created an event around it -- what all the parents at first thought was just a nature hike.

My boy's on the left in the above picture, which gives me a funny feeling when I look at it. It's just him and his cousin and another friend, the three of them way out ahead of the rest of us, leading the way. This picture reflects the way he and his friends are becoming people removed from their parents, people themselves, which is so different from the way things used to be. My boy and his buds, just hanging out.

This is the moment the nature hike became something else. Wait! What's that in the distance? That thing, that black blur. You see it?

Is that...? Could it possibly be?

A BEAR! And what made this all the more awesome was that most of the parents at the party didn't know this was going to happen either. It was a surprise for everyone, and for a few moments there was an uncertainty to the party, like, hmmm, is that really a bear, and should we be getting out our cellphones and dialling 911?

Now my boy and my daughter both were clutching my hand and the dozen other kids along this party also were getting close to their parents. Should we go around? Should we go and see the bear? My kids weren't sure.

I reassured them that if the bear was in High Park, then he must be a friendly bear, and both of them were still clutching me as we got up close to him.

That's my sister next to the bear. Hugging him. Strangely, at this moment, my sister's husband Isaac was nowhere to be found. My kids didn't notice, however. They were too entranced by the bear. My son wanted to feel his teeth. "Why is his mouth staying open all the time?" he kept asking. I said, "It's because he has a cold."

My boy wanted to feel the teeth. He climbed onto the log and reached a hand into the bear's mouth just as the bear moved. The movement startled him and this is my boy about to fall off the log.

Now my daughter gets into the action. On the log that's my nephew, the birthday boy. "Hey!" he shouted out. "He's wearing shoes! The bear's wearing shoes!"

"Yeah, of course," I said. "What else would a bear wear on his feet?"

That kind of stumped him. Shortly after the bear had to leave. I guess he had an appointment or something. We gathered around a nearby picnic table for hot chocolate and cake and discussed how today was the first time any of us had ever seen a bear, a real-live bear. Best. Party. Ever. (Other lessons for birthday-party-hosting: Include a surprise. Don't let the parents in on the surprise, because then they'll be delighted, too. And always, at every party, include a bear.)

Apocalypse Dad: Thoughts on The Walking Dead

The first season of the AMC show, The Walking Dead, ended last night, and I wrote an essay about it for The Good Men Project:

As The Walking Dead develops, the show turns out to be full of fathers. In fact, has there ever been a television show that depicted more fathers acting like fathers—good fathers, engaged fathers, fathers who stand up for their families—than The Walking Dead? More...