We’ve been attending newborn classes in anticipation of our little bundle of -sleeplessness- joy. I think I’ve said it before here, but if you’re having a baby in the NYC area and need classes, definitely check out “realbirth”:http://realbirth.com. Sharp, witty New Yorkers delivering the straight dope on pain management, breastfeeding, and swaddling: there are few better ways to spend an evening in the city.
Last Tuesday’s class revealed that a father’s testosterone levels drop sharply after childbirth. Our instructor Erica explained that this was an evolutionary feature — so fathers don’t eat the baby. I wrote down dutifully, “Rule #3: do not eat the baby.”
Google never fails to impress when you’re looking for a topic that you’ve never in your life thought of before. I just stumbled over “this Guardian article”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/woman/story/0,,1792138,00.html about fatherhood and the demands of the global marketplace. Money quote (of which there are _many_):
That is another thing no one told me before my daughter was born – looking after a baby is stress-relief. The mythology of fatherhood says that responsibility for a fragile young life will grey your hair overnight. But the urgent simplicity of a child’s needs insulates you from the complex demands of the outside world. When I first went back to work I felt agoraphobia for the first time. My reassuringly narrowed horizons were forced back open. The idea that you are expected, after a few hearty pats on the back, to get on with business as usual struck me as grotesque. I sat in meetings struggling to care. I now live in fear of missing some minuscule step my daughter might have taken down the road of infant development, a newly articulate gurgle or a very prolific poo. Fathering is addictive like that.
Rule #3 (which really was another version of Rule #1, anyway) has now been replaced: “Don’t work too much.”
My “brother-in-law”:http://posegate.blogspot.com would like to write about his addiction to Guitar Hero II, but he’s still too busy trying to master that solo in “Psychobilly Freakout” at the Expert level, thankyouverymuch. We got a chance to develop some repetitive stress injury on their new wireless fender during our last trip into the frozen Ithaca tundra. It was a lot of fun, but what I’m really waiting for is Bluegrass Hero — I’ve already got my 37-button wireless mandolin on order at Amazon.
“Danny and Kim Iverson”:http://www.dannyiverson.com came over last weekend with their son DJ. They’re working on growing a church in one of the more impoverished areas of Newark, not more than a couple miles from our place: real, front lines, give away everything you’ve got and come follow me ministry work. Danny lit up when he saw the guitar case in our living room. “You play?” he beamed at me. “I hack,” I said, admitting that I had learned some chords to lead worship at our college Bible study.
I opened up the case and showed him the axe; the strings were embarrassingly old and the guitar out of tune. I toyed with it for a minute or two before handing it to him, watched him place the capo at the second fret _backwards_ leaving open the top E, B and bottom E strings (“for that alternate tuning, but open sound”, he explained), and noodle through a few things he had written. He held us captivated for a few minutes before handing it back.
Later that night I went back to my to-do list and added, “practice guitar more often”.
It starts with a glance at the crackberry a little after six. Usually my favorite time of the day to spend reading, thinking and soaking in anything I can find that has nothing to do with web 2.0.
It’s always a one-liner, maybe two. They haven’t yet begun with the words “Where’s my … ?” (opting instead for “I need”), for which I’m thankful. But it means getting on the VPN and spending a little time in Excel or Word or Acrobat. And delivering. Soon.
We call them KJs, short for knee-jerk assignments. There’s little time to think and less time to second-guess. Adam calls them “hero or goat” moments, which I think is funny, since I recently learned that “few animals walk taller than the he-goat”:http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=proverbs+30%3A29-31. But I think he rather meant “the stupid kind”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40091 instead.
And so we swing back to the 3 Column K2, rapidly-maturing K2, newly-discovered “Blue Zinfandel”:http://www.briangardner.com/themes/blue-zinfandel-wordpress-theme.htm theme. The timeline, which I’ve taken to calling the “attention stream”, may likely reappear in later iterations.
It’s a love/hate thing I have about blogging: design is hard, and harder still to justify when you have to actually _tell_ people that you spent your Sunday afternoon “designing the blog” — looking at the ground, tracing your foot through the dirt. Admitting to having a vested interest in the online world (like having a MySpace or Facebook profile) is still embarrassing for those of us over 25. Well, those of us who are over 25 and aren’t making a dime at this, anyway.
I like to play at writing more than I like to actually do it. Same goes for coding, praying, and just about anything that requires hard work. I recently realized this and changed the homepage of my browser. (It used to point to my newsreader, where I download the world into bite-sized chunks and read about what other people are doing.)
It takes others less time, I think, to realize that there’s a very short window to accomplish anything in life, and a lot of mundane steps to get there. Sometimes it takes me a while to figure stuff like that out.
So I changed my homepage to my to-do list, instead.
