Little Boss

Dear J-

I took the opportunity of a doctor’s appointment to take the remainder of the day off (by the time I would have gotten to work, it would have already been noon and there aren’t enough hours in the day to make it worth it. That said, I think figgy spilled some fairly significant beans when she started screaming that “Legoland is over there! THERE!” as I was talking to my boss to call in sick. I needed the time off; though, and If I’m asked, I’m not going to lie about it — it’ll just make things needlessly complicated.

Yesterday we bowled enough to raise and pop a blister on my finger — my bowling hand is my writing hand so I’ll be going back to work mostly fit for duty. The apathy extends and grows; time off does nothing but make me appreciate what I’ve got at home. Long hours on the road between here and there say that we should make an effort to move closer, but I like where we are more than the pain of having more time to spend at work. What sacrifices are we expected to make for money? The literature says one thing, stories and happily ever afters don’t seem to get much traction under daylight.

The smaller things make the moments; there’s a frozen tableau on display and a million vignettes on display at Miniland; we’ve reached saturation, though, and every aspect doesn’t hold the same sort of fascination that it did. Same goes at work; the little challenges are losing their luster, and everything lately has become tedious. Once the routine changes, things improve, right? Why are we doing these things — how can having a two-year-old boss seem more reasonable than a fifty-year-old?

Detail Devil

Dear J-

There are no new ideas in sitcom land, apparently (Modern Family, meet Arrested Development; The Middle, I understand that Malcolm in the Middle is looking for half its title; modern dysfunctional friend ensembles, how about Seinfeld or Cheers or Taxi or M*A*S*H), but that’s a complaint that is itself not new either; five years ago or five years from now, let me know what’s not new on TV tonight. Now that the Super Bowl is over (I am plaeasantly surprised, first that I actually sat down and watched a half of football this year, secondly that the team I wanted to win actually won) everyone can stop treading lightly around the 800-lb gorilla event of American TV. Then again, the Winter Games will be consuming our lives pretty soon here.

Weekends are not always the easiest; I sometimes look forward to the drudgery of work as an antidote to the controlled chaos of a Saturday. We work together to tag-team the insistent demands for the next thing: sit here, put this on, let’s play with this-and-that and I know it’s not a contest, it’s not an accounting of who did what for how long — but you can’t help but tick off little tallies. You don’t want to use it, but your tongue is inextricably drawn to speak; words fly out without warning, too late now.

You’re back to the devil you dread because it’s reliable and something you know. Rather than spending time exploring the unknown, we prefer what we know, what we can deal with (or not, as may be applicable). We are looking at at least two cousins’ weddings this year, one of which could involve a cross-country trip to New York, and the thought of two five-hour flights with a three year-old terrifies me, frankly. I admire the adventurers but perhaps from a distance, too far a distance. What’s here is comfortable; there’s a whole scary world out there, right?

Mike

Find Time

Dear J-

Say what you will about us being spoiled for good weather — it rained today and rather than try to dig up some kind of inside place where I’m sure every other parent would be, we stayed at home again for the first Saturday in months. Call it a rain day. We had our usual trials (the crazy trial of the day was inadvertent potty training, as she chose not to put a diaper back on for roughly half an hour) but somehow we’ve managed to get to the evening without killing each other, so it was a successful experiment, if not one that I’d care to repeat.

The next thing to worry about is splashing in puddles, of course; we spent a few minutes outside staring at the gutter carrying a rapid stream downhill and throwing various bits of leaves in, watching them shoot away. We stayed dry enough, I suppose; everything except for shoes, which were always in some state of dampness for me (I loved the concept of waterproofing, and tested them every chance I got; she has clearly inherited that bug from me). There are no merit badges for sailing ships in your imagination, but you can’t go wrong with it, after all.

Keep inside, and it’s hard enough to keep her interest up; at the same time that she’s grown more active, she’s grown more interested in the world all around. If we had warmer clothes that could keep her dry as well, we might still be outside staring at the gutter even now. There are so many things we can share and yet there isn’t always enough time to make them happen; time is flexible between the endless moments screaming and the winking blur of happiness.

Mike

Enough Good

Dear J-

All around us, arrows nudging us in the right direction: this lane, that exit, sign here, one way, cross traffic does not stop. Our lives are no less guided by external influences subtly indicating the right choice through risk and reward, immediate payouts balanced against long-term strategies. Do you heed the signs or forge your own trail in this world? If you remember the Oregon Trail game (type BLAM), the victorious strategy (not dying somewhere along the way) was moderation in nearly all things: pace, cost, food; such lessons are not always lost on youth, though we all need some wallowing in excess now and again.

Folks online are quick to condemn moderation; spend enough time on forums and comments and you’d think that anything short of a Leica S2 is inadequate to take the most regular of snapshots; I know I’m guilty of that more than most, as my regular kit generally exceeds my capabilities on a regular basis. Yes, it is indisputable that the Leica is better and produces quality results, but we’re losing sight of what’s adequate and confusing want for need. There’s a recent article on Wired that dares to mention in passing that since getting a Panasonic GF1, the author has barely touched his Nikon D700, which touched off a storm of flaming comments questioning everything from the author’s abilities to his competence. The point isn’t that the small camera is better (it’s not), it’s enough for most people; there will be a need for D700 images in this world, but that market is narrower than we suspect.

I don’t know if you grew up listening to AM radio; my dad had a little portable Zenith in the kitchen that he turned on the moment we got home to the second we finished washing the dishes. One of the better commentators was Charles Osgood and his Osgood Files, where he’d often recite, in rhyme, some clever lesson. My favorite concerns “pretty good*,” a deadly phrase that leads to complacency; we are taught to reject the notion of good enough — strive for the best, after all — and it’s a noble notion, but one inevitably we’ll have to compromise sooner or later, at least in terms of stuff and things (we should always strive to better ourselves, right?).

Mike

Fox Box

Dear J-

We’ve been reading a fair number of Dr. Seuss books lately, so my dark quiet mornings are filled with finding words to rhyme (it’s not easy to find something that matches “Encinitas” or “Leucadia”). One of the blurbs on the back of the books is a quote from Ellen Goodman how Geisel delivered a karate-chop to Dick and Jane by taking two hundred words and dreaming up Green Eggs and Ham. I think the real relief was from parents who find the stories far more amusing to read out loud than, say, Pat the Bunny (Now YOU do ___).

There are different tiers of Seuss silliness; on the one hand you have the smaller books, starting with Hop on Pop and including the iconic Cat in the Hat and the already-noted Ham which are suited for younger folks: lots of repetition, little words, silly antics and pictures (me, I still remember the absurdity of embedding a toy boat in a cake from when I was little). Then there’s the bigger books, like the various Hortons and Sneetches which are much more sophisticated and richer stories overall. I don’t think the small books aren’t without merit — they’re fun to read, even if you end up going sing-song halfway through — but there’s a clear difference in storytelling quality.

I know there must have been more worthy children’s literature published in the last twenty years or so, but yesterday we had Make Way for Ducklings, Horton Hatches the Egg, and The Marshmallow Incident (Judi and Ron Barrett) and of the three, my least favorite was Marshmallow. It makes me feel like a consummate snob: oh yes, we’ll read that, but we may not enjoy it; the classics, you know, are so much better. Yet part of it is my own ignorance of contemporary authors; I’ve read good things from Mo Willems, for instance, but haven’t taken the step of picking any up. It’s easier to keep revisiting the classics, as that doesn’t require the same investment in research and screening, but I’m sure I’d be surprised and impressed by the authors of today.

Mike

Individual Formula

Dear J-

As it turns out figgy is right-handed (we can tell because that’s the eatin’ hand) which will make life easier in grade school, at least, where you don’t have to search for the one or two rusty LEFT scissors or smudge your handwriting across the page as you go. Both theVet and I are right handed, but that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t seem to follow genetics; I have suspicions that the species is adaptable enough to accomodate such a slight variation, so perhaps it’s the environment: she sees us holding fork and spoon in our right hands and follows suit unconsciously.

After all, do you remember anyone telling you which hand you were supposed to be using? I don’t know if I’m left-eyed by nature or if I’ve been unconsciously emulating my dad behind the camera; I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether the dominant hand is slightly larger (yes — if you subscribe to the notion that if you use it more often, the muscles are more developed; no — if you believe that when you use it more often, the bones are restrained by the overdeveloped muscles). It’s a funny thing to think about, lateral dominance, one that’s so fundamental to your being and yet so natural that it’s hardly worth a second glance.

There are undoubtedly a lot of things in this world to worry about: the cost of college, whether the world will exist after 2012, Zeta Reticulans, poisonous spiders, the guy driving in the lane next to you with phone glued to ear; it is relatively frivolous to comment on people’s hands, even with comparratively trivial and big issues. Yet it’s another brick in the wall of conformance; how much do you measure up to your fellow humans, what’s your cubit, where does your percentile fall? It’s like we celebrate the death of each little quirk that makes us individual with a number or checkbox: initial here, uh-huh, and yet we’re no closer to a formula expressing a person’s life.

Mike

Unintended Consequence

Dear J-

If it has been a winter of discontent, much of that angst has surrounded the once-unblemished name of Toyota; between floor mats and sticky pedals they’ve apparently isolated the problem to the hardware, especially given the circumstantial evidence linking the wrong floor mat trapping the pedal and their switch in pedal suppliers. However, it’s telling that the models affected are all the so-called drive-by-wire models, where the pedal is not mechanically linked, via a cable, to the engine throttle. Think about it: if we’re able to get software perfect out of the box we’d never have bugfix releases; and when was the last time all your peripherals spoke perfectly together the first time you hooked them up?

We’re in a strange world with cars; on the one hand you have OBD II computers governing the engine, adjusting air and fuel to the point where my twelve-year-old Subaru will pass California smog without blinking an eye. On the other, you have figurative gremlins that are lethal: if the Saylor-Cleofe crash was the tipping point, it was a terrible one. Though that was blamed on the wrong floor mats, can you believe that faced with a runaway car, a Highway Patrol officer wouldn’t be able to take drastic measures, like shifting to neutral? Flames were reportedly shooting from the brakes, indicating that he’d done what he could.

Something is rotten in the design choices made, and I suspect a failure in redundancy. Systems affecting safety are separated into multiple independent, redundant channels, whether you’re talking about the Space Shuttle or a power plant. The channels are constantly polled and anomalous readings in any one channel may shut the entire system down. Without a cogent explanation of the analyses that led to the pedal friction fix, we may never know the real reason for unintended acceleration, but it’s clear that Toyota are anxious to declare victory and move back to the business of building cars; I wonder if the pedal design is unique to Toyota and if it is not, why it receives the blame.

Mike

Active Life

Dear J-

If Bruce Lee was still alive he’d be nearly 70, just about the same age as my dad and probably as rock-hard as ever; anyone who makes his living by embodying bad-assness knows there are no days off (even if off days are excusable, Jackie Chan, Spy Next Door). And yeah, Bruce Lee would be someone no one wanted to mess with, but in a footrace, it would be a near thing between him and my dad, who has always been concerned about fitness.

We had a little gym in the house, this after getting a rowing machine that was a six-in-one device (mainly that consisted of wrestling the machine into life-threateningly unstable positions, but this was just before the explosion of product liability lawsuits); I remember when I was little it was a rare day we weren’t headed out to ride our bikes, or we got taken along to the basketball court to watch him play, or skating under the US Pavilion, or swim in the university pool. He didn’t pick up running until we were in college, though; I remember him calling me with the news that he’d clocked in the 12K Lilac Bloomsday Run at just over an hour, a time I’d never done even in high school at the supposed peak of my physical prowess.

He’s probably up and jogging right now as I write this, somewhere around the neighborhood they’ve moved. They hae adopted the area wholeheartedly, signing up for lessons (ballroom dancing and Photoshop) and heading out to local parks for various sightseeing opportunities. It’s the lessons of a life spent active that I need to pass down and keep passing down; for every moment we spend thinking we can’t, we could have been doing, right?

Mike

Low Drama

Dear J-

Bereft of other choices, we went to the Zoo again today (we don’t generally head to the same place two days in a row, but we’re at the point where it’s the lesser of multiple evils. As it turns out we took nearly the same route as yesterday too, which sure didn’t help the case with figgy’s current case of recalcitrance. Honestly, we were prepared for more resistance, but we didn’t have to drag her around as much as usual.

We can tell how she’s feeling — whether sick or not — based on how she reacts to our suggestions. Mild resistance is normal, but whooping, screaming opposition means she’s not feeling well, and we were used to that from last week, I suppose. The longer we go without a huge blowout the more nervous I get: we think that the natives are quiet — too quiet — and then the ominous drumbeats start up again.

After lunch we headed back out to see if she would be able to take a nap: both yesterday and today were marked by none (and yet we ask, at daycare, there seems to be no problems falling asleep, much like me at work) and we kept expecting another struggle, but we made it to La Jolla without incident and without losing consciousness. She’s made it remarkably drama-free this weekend, and I can’t imagine any other way.

Mike

Appreciate Together

Dear J-

My parents were are big believers in equal measures: everything that I got they’d find a way to make it happen for my brother. I particularly remember one time after piano lessons we stopped by a store and we each got a quarter to stick into the capsule toy machine. I went first and struck gold with a little wind-up toy robot, silver with blue accents. My brother went and got a Whistling Pickle; after emptying all my dad’s pockets of quarters and at least five Pickles later, we found an equivalent robot in the check-out line on a blister-pack card.

Likewise, my brother got to head out to camp for six weeks when he turned thirteen, so my parents, left with one rattling around the house that summer of 1985, signed me up for a couple of local day camps at the college; one was about career planning and the other was a science camp. Both were meant for high school kids and I still wonder what they thought of seeing a fourth-grader tagging along with the rest of them. It was the summer I first heard Madonna; it was the summer I learned about Voltron from one of my brother’s peers: a girl peer.

There is a yawning gulf in those three years between ten and thirteen, maybe not so much in interests or conversation but more in social norms; outside of school, she was the most interesting person I’d ever met: comic books and Voltron, fascinating home life (her dad was career Navy, a W-4, and between the constant moves and different environments, that was plenty). Yet in asking my brother that fall after school started poisoning the well of my mind; learning she was of the social underclass of eighth grade unmade the work of that week, the hours of conversations and common discoveries.

The acid of junior high makes us intensely self-conscious of our social status and everything we can do to affect it, most of all hanging out with the right people. We do the wrong things for the wrong reasons; we’re achingly selfish and ignorant of our capacity for empathy that seemed so simple just a few years past. Why is it so easy? Perhaps we need to learn about alone before we can appreciate together.

Mike