Farewell Perspective

Dear J-

Under normal circumstances you’d be able to see the upcoming lunar eclipse from North America only from Alaska and northwestern Canada — it’s going to be right around the time that I usually get up for work anyway so I might take the opportunity to get out and take a few pictures if I can remember to get up. The Sun, Earth, and Moon will line up in a way that the shadow cast by the Earth will fall over the Moon for roughly an hour starting around 4:45 local time. I’m not sure what it will look like to us here in San Diego but I intend to find out; I remember trying to catch prior eclipses and whining to be let backk into the house: it’s cold, it’s boring. One thing I didn’t know is that the lineup occurs at least twice a year so it’s not as though the event is rare by any means.

It helps me put today in perspective, after all. People change their jobs all the time and leave their comfortable haunts in order to pursue a number of reasons: money, power, fame, love, growth. I asked myself earlier this week if it was the right decision and I stick by the answer: a thousand times yes. Yesterday they broght a cake around and had me come up to give a little silly speech before they walked me out the door. I don’t know that I have any particula insight or words of wisdom to impart that these folks don’t already know — after all, everything I know is something I’ve learned from them — but this is what’s important:

I haven’t worked in too many places in my nine years on site: there were the four years I was a budget analyst (Excel jockey) and then the five years as a procurement engineer, so I don’t think I have the experience to say definitively. I’ll say this, though: the time I’ve had here I’ve always admired how well the four groups that make up our procurement organization work together. As many times as I’ve heard that I’ll be missed because of the help I give you should know that I’ve gotten as much or more help from everyone else throughout the years; it’s easy to say that I’ll miss you the rest of the group too but I mean it: we are a family here — sometimes a loud, contentious family, and we don’t always agree, but we work spectacularly well together for our customers and I’ll always be proud that I was a part of that.

Mike

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Two World Blend

Dear J-

As much as I may complain about the length of some weekend days — this before we wised up and started bringing the double stroller along to give our backs and arms a break — having to go from the 1000MPH pace of a Sunday to the deliberate pace of a Monday is always a question of slamming on the brakes and hoping for the best. In a way it’s relaxing with no small beasts clinging in protest to furniture against bedtime or some chore but it’s a lonely sort of consolation. The aggravation may be high at times but so is the reward. Frustration makes me short and there’s no real reason she keeps asking me to be happy but I know it can’t be good, this image she’s already built up.

We have to bring a little bit of each world into the other; given that I can’t drag the kids to work the next best thing would be bringing some of the patience I show at work back into my life at home. The face I show at work shouldn’t have to come off as soon as I leave the site. Why should there be two people? Do I need the escape hatch to make up for biting my tongue at work? Or is it a lack of respect bred by the comfort of home? Try to reconcile the career you keep with the person you know you can be and pretend that there’s someone else watching you at all times. That’s what it comes down to: if you wouldn’t act that way in front of your mom — or someone else you respect — what makes this situation different?

Drop the pretense. Who you are is who you show and who you reflect in the eyes of those you love. The need for approval should extend to those who already like me — it doesn’t need to be a matter of winning it all the time (or perhaps I should imagine I need to do better, to win the respect). Find your way out.

Mike

Kid Center

Dear J-

Sometimes I think in a morbid mode and wonder what would happen to the kids if we disappeared tomorrow. The whole point of this trip to San Jose was to see my brother, back in the States after just short of two years in Taiwan, and we’ve had a good couple of days now to see he’s essentially the same devoted dad, happy to escape the regular grind of life but clearly missing them, having taken every opportunity possible to hold Calcifer and take the burden off of us. I think we’re set between my brother and theVet’s sister, and that makes us incredibly lucky. After today when figgy has been just about as trying as possible (between the extra sadness of hunger, the lack of sleep, and the lack of a same-age playmate to boss around [can’t wait for another visit from Baby J]) and they haven’t been scared off (I think) I think we’re doing all right.

Case in point: we ate two lunches today. The first one was at the Happy Hollow Zoo to revive her flagging spirits (she passed up a chance to ride on the carousel, and she never misses a chance to ride on the carousel — she will even badger us (as she did later that afternoon) to ride on the quarter-driven three-animal carousels in malls and grocery stores) and the second turned into a dessert buffet for her. After I went off to get her some watermelon and returned with a plate full of the most expensive buffet food I could find (nigiri sushi: total net cost to the restarant maybe $5) she plowed through that and her aunt, my brother’s wife, took pity on me and accompanied her to get a plate of coordinated pink jello and cakes.

The longer you spend immersed in your own family it seems like you know too much and too little all at once: the smallest things set you off without warning and the escalation proceeds unabated, unchecked. It’s not the current situation that’s driving you mad, it’s the thousand other things that have piled up over hours and days and all of a sudden it’s not about the situation, it’s the history spilling out. Sometimes the shared experiences keep you from really understanding each other. It takes time and distance to appreciate what you’ve always had.

Mike

Three Status

Dear J-

There’s a short list of things I’ve learned not to get too comfortable around: sharks, killer whales, elephants, ostriches, running cars, and high-velocity games. Add to that children, television watching, and sugar. The weekend offers so many lessons that it’s hard to know where to start. For those of you who can’t wait until your kids are old enough tp come run and join you in bed on the weekends you must have well_behaved kids who nestle quietly in the warm spot between you for some well-deserved cuddle time. On the other hand there’s figgy and the pro-wrestling moves she adopts to get us going iln the mornings.

When she is sleepy she grows properly lethargic, but when she’s really sleepy she gets hyper — that’s our sign that a proper impending crash is coming, and we’d do well to let it run its destructive course, picking up the pieces later is much easier. The truth is that sometimes I’m at a loss to explain the force of nature she becomes, hurricane figgy, prone to destruction and benevolence, often in the space of a few sentences. Then again she is nigh-four and that accounts for a lot of it. You know how they talk about the terrible twos? For us it’s been a little more like threes as well, though not so much terrible as let’s say outspoken and confident. But what charms at two wears by five, so of course things can’t continue this way forever.

She has her own way of handling things. We hear our own words of frustration creeping out in her voice when there’s something we haven’t done to her satisfaction. Any real boss would be laughed out given the demands her Imperial Majesty gives but we do it with good humor because she has us laughing helplessly the next minute, something impossibly precocious (she has started singing pop songs using her curreny vocabulary, and has somehow figured out the big dog isn’t coming back soon) or misunderstood (I can take my brother out for a walk, right?) making all the difference in the day. She is crazy, as all three-not-quite-four year olds are and I love her.

Mike

P.S. I came home today and theVet told me she’d earned two timeouts today, one for not listening, and one for painting the chair with cheese. Apparently she was not as hungry as advertised.

Grandpa Watching

Dear J-

I talked about my grandpa as one of the first entries I wrote, but forgot (or was perhaps too embarrassed) to relate this anecdote; once when getting out of the back seat of that 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass wagon, he wasn’t moving fast enough so I put my foot square on his butt and helped him along. Forget filial piety, one of the cornerstones of the Confucian ethics my parents struggled to instill in us; I was six and believed that (1) the world revolved around me and (2) he was put on earth to humiliate me.

I’m still working on the selfish thing (lenses may be to take pictures that figgy will enjoy, but that does not make them family-type purchases), but figgy’s been teaching us lessons on humility and invisibility, or, more accurately, lack of subtlety. In second grade, grandpa used to walk me to school until I’d heard too many “fatsos” emanating from the passing buses — rather than taking pride in his solid bearing (he was solid as a rock, all the twenty-five years I knew him, up until the cancer ate that out of him), I bowed to the questionable judgment of twelve-year-olds.

It took us an hour to walk the five blocks back from the daycare on Friday, as figgy would stop, begging for more milk (or water), asking for ups, or flit around porches like some sort of day-time moth. All the while smiling, laughing, yelling, beguiling — living out loud, as the slogan goes — as I wondered whether it would be useful or not to have a couple of extra arms transplanted so I could extract her from various situations (please please please stop banging on the hollow, resonant garage door); perhaps Doctor Octopus’s first impulse was towards the child-care sector.

I miss grandpa more now that figgy keeps blossoming more each day (today, in fact, she shut herself in the bathroom — the better to fiddle with various items undisturbed by well-meaning fathers attempting to straighten up — for ten minutes); I’m sure that he would get a kick out of this little human dynamo, alternately dashing and dealing affection, following up disrespect with disarming charm. We were complete strangers when introduced in 1981, not helped by the language barrier, but I remember his delight in watching our energy. That kick to the seat of the pants? He kept our secret, covering it up as an old man’s stumble on icy/rocky ground, a wink between us. And that’s why I’m sure there would be copious, gooey love flowing, keeping the family stuck together.

Mike

MomsDay

Dear J-

You talk about these Hallmark holidays like Mother’s Day not knowing that they’re just card-selling gimmicks, right? There’s some powerful greeting card lobby out there that forces all kinds of arcane holidays onto the official calendar; before long, you know, there’s going to be some kind of Hillside Goat Day designed to recognize the importance of the foliage-control caprines keeping our burnable hillsides safely cropped. On the other hand, there is that saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes …

I will readily admit that I thought the two big parental holidays did nothing but move flowers and provide a nice rhyme for “Grads and ___” up until it happened to me. To us. Yeah, it’s the standard cliché that you never know how your life changes until it, well, changes. You have the vaguest idea from what people tell you, but you don’t realize what sacrifices are made until you give them up yourself. The one thing that I’m rich in is time, and while I used to give freely of that to work, I prefer to bank and save that time for home now. Time only scratches the surface, though.

We need to remember what sacrifices moms make today, though; the list is long and exhausting; when I try to play at being mom, I know that I’ve got a lot of shortcomings. When figgy wasn’t taking milk from a bottle, that made for excruciatingly long Fridays and Saturdays; when she decided only one of us could read her bedtime stories — that one not being me, by the way — when she needs the million things that only mom is able to supply, I am profoundly humbled and grateful to have found the right moms in my life to have helped me along the way to be the man I am, the son, the husband, the father. Thanks. I love you.

Mike

Undergraduate — Your Future Looms

Lots of great things happened to me at Berkeley. This is aimed more at the political side, but I loved living in the co-ops (although when I went back this past summer, I was horrified by how dirty we must have all been), I loved the atmosphere, and I found love there — what more could I ask for?

*****

When I reached Berkeley to begin studies as an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering, I had no idea what to expect or even what things would be like.

High School (Aren’t We Joe Cool Yet?)

I’m not convinced I got the most out of high school. But at least I got out.

*****

To be honest, things didn’t change much in high school. The hair of the student body didn’t pose the fire hazard that it used to, but we stayed in the groups that we’d split into as junior high people. I don’t condemn it because it just happens and seems as natural as plate tectonics: huge masses rushing towards each other and one would inevitably grind the other down, but not without rumbling and trembling. It’s not always a wasteland, though; sometimes you find genuinely honest and wonderful people, like some of my neighboring locker-owners. We all had to deal with the peculiar quirks of the school, such as how it was designed for southern California weather (and hence was a series of disconnected buildings) while experiencing a snow-belt reality. I still like almost all of the people who graduated with me, but it was difficult to reach across the group borders afterwards; I have yet to contact probably 90% of my graduating class with something stronger than a rumor.

Cold Water on Your Back

I must have really been homesick those two years in Boston. That’s all I can excuse myself for.

*****

All the same, I really enjoyed grade school. You got crayons, glue, pencils, and a notebook in September. You listened to stories after lunch. You wondered what was on top of the roof, over the fire escape, past the fences, behind the bushes, under the slides, inside the teacher’s lounge. I personally had a huge fear of being in the sunlight with the bloodstones present. As my friend described it, it would suck the blood right out of your body, much as lab reports and midterms were to do in a few years.