January 2, 2015 OK, first let me be clear. I am madly in love with my super foxy wife. She is the be all and end all of all I will ever need. This is not about another  woman. It is about the weird state of daytime TV that I have recently been exposed to. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

My morning routine of heading off to work on bike to dazzle Portland State students with feminist theory and stories of Nazi skinheads has been put on hold while I’m on parental leave. Here’s the new dad routine:

7 am Get up and make coffee and help my wife get ready for work.

8:30 Take Andrea to work at Planned Parenthood.

9 am Clean the kitchen with baby in her frog chair and we listen to podcasts.

10 am Maybe baby naps so I can work on this blog. She’s probably crying so I’ll give her some applesauce and try to not let my blood pressure explode. But a baby face covered in applesauce is pretty cute.

11 am Bottle Time! Baby gets her first bottle of mother’s milk while we watch some Regis & Kathie Lee.

Noon Some tummy time and exercise. I put the baby in the bouncy seat and try to do some housework. I check to see if I won the lottery and check how many emails I can ignore. Eat a sandwich.

1 pm Often we go to pick up a fresh bottle of milk from mom and go to the store to get food for dinner. I notice that bars are open.

2 pm Nap time please sweet baby Jesus.

3 pm 2nd Bottle Time! We put on Ellen, Cozy’s favorite show. She falls asleep by the first guest.

4 pm More housework before mom gets home. I might squeeze in an episode of Justified for my manly moment.

5 pm Go pick up Mom! Baby gurgles in happiness.

It’s surprising how fast the day goes (how little gets done). It’s given me a chance to drop back into the world of network daytime TV and it sucks. When I was a kid, daytime TV was geared towards stay-at-home housewives, so there were lots of soap operas designed to bring a little passion into their dull day. (Oh, All My Children, take me to Pine Valley.) There were also plenty of mindlessly fun gameshows, like Hollywood Squares, Matchgame and Joker’s Wild. A day home from school meant The $25,000 Pyramid and the Price Is Right prize models.

The daytime line-up seems more geared to women than ever. From The View to The Chew, fashion, cooking and celebrity gossip seem to still be the main themes. But between the informercials for Proactive and Kathie Lee and Hoda baking cupcakes with firemen there are some bright spots. This is not 1965. In 2015 it is understood that women actually have brains and can tackle tough issues between their shopping tips. I think the legendary battle between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasslebeck over the Iraq War in 2007 on The View was a turning point on television. But like the “debate” on evolution (Sorry, creationists, you lost a while ago), the chatter is never framed in larger issues of oppression. Maybe I’ve missed Whoopi Goldberg’s position statement on patriarchy and intersectionality. Has Angela Davis been a guest on The Talk? At this point I’d settle for bell hooks as a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal dressed as a mariachi.

And of course Ellen DeGeneres has single handedly turned the tide on marriage equality. What red state Ellen fan is going to say, “Those queers are all going to hell. Except for Ellen.” Her dancing has won hearts and minds. Or maybe it’s the cute baby videos. Or the heteronormative hunk-fest. But we’ll give Ellen a pass on that one. Demographics!

There is some real entertainment value sprinkled in. I find Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan (Live!) a real highlight in our TV day. I remember Ripa’s first arrival on All My Children in 1990 as the rocker kid Hayley Vaughan. Her hair was dyed black and she was headed to a Metaluna concert (Great fake band name). She had a spark then and now the 44-year-old mom is tearing up daytime TV with her neurotic energy (Sometimes she spins around so fast I worry that her bobble head will come flying off). Her chemistry with Strahan on Live! is infectious and, like a train full of beautiful people crashing into a bus full of serial killers, you can’t look away. I have to wonder how a chat show featuring a petite white woman and a large black man would have gone over in 1965, but in 2015 it’s more about the manic energy of Ripa played against her gentle giant than any larger social issues, for better or worse. I’d say better. Who wants a debate on GMOs when Ripa is on a six left-turn tangent? Watching Kelly is like having Sugar Mountain liquified by the bright light of the sun and carried by a Keystone XL pipeline straight into your cerebellum. You think the baby drools a lot. But it’s a drool of bliss.

Taking care of a baby can be tiring. Sleep is not an option. I just want to thank Kelly for providing me an alternative to snorting lines of crank. Kelly Ripa is the new crank!

Yeah, I should use this time to read more. (I’m almost done with Linda Ronstadt’s autobiography.) I’ve got a volume on Eco-feminism to get to but it’s hard when the baby is crying. The TV is a pacifier. It always has been. But dad needs a binky, too.

UPDATE: Here is another reason to love Kelly Ripa:

Kelly Ripa Gives Inspiring Speech at 2015 GLAAD Media Awards

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