Professor Radington

This is one of my favorite columns that I wrote for the Advance-Titan, the college newspaper at UW-Oshkosh. It was originally published in September of 2006.

Reader, do you know what I really look forward to in life? It’s not the fickle stuff like the free weekends of Cinemax or the popular return of the mustache (Bold prediction: the ‘stache makes a comeback in 2011, along with Zubaz pants.). I’m really looking forward to that moment when I cradle my first infant child and she wraps her TINY hand around my finger and squeezes with the rare strength of an unblemished heart. Do you need to hug the person next to you after reading that? Yeah, I’d like to do the same, but I’m currently seated beside an editor that smells like microwaved Preparation-H.

Kids grow up, of course, and someday they might be squeezing your throat instead of your finger. Once kids start tossing firecrackers at the elderly and blowing all their allowance money on Vaseline, I have no clue how to deal with them. But the squeezing-finger thing seems pretty appealing, so with absolutely no further thought on the matter, I want to be a daddy.

Before I father an actual human baby, I’d like to prove my care-taking skills on a more manageable level. When you play a video game with a difficulty setting, you don’t start out at the “expert level,” do you? Hell no. So prior to fathering a baby, I figured I’d take care of a dog. BIG MISTAKE. Unlike babies, I’ve never seen a dog wearing a diaper, and so I logically assumed they are born with an innate sense of knowing where to go number 2. Not wearing diapers is an act of deceit on the part of the dog population. After gorging the platter of Thai food I generously provided, my adopted dog Maddux couldn’t wait a measly SIXTEEN HOURS to do his business outdoors. When I returned home from my road trip to an abandoned Fanny-Pack factory in northeast Iowa, the mess I discovered prompted me to return Maddux to the Humane Society.

He didn’t even use the chopsticks, the slob.

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This is but a snippet of "Professor Radington." You can read the rest by ordering a copy of my book, titled "There Will be Blog."

www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html