Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Tuesdays with Sadie: Advice for new dads
So your baby is learning that if she throws food off of her plate it ends up on the floor. This is your lucky day, dad. Your baby has just learned cause and effect. Take a moment to reflect on what a great milestone she’s achieved. This is how human beings discovered things like gravity, astrophysics, and TMZ. It’s a wonderful thing. Now stop congratulating yourself for a moment and sweep up the floor because she’s gotten tofu and raspberries everywhere.
Remind yourself that she’s a good baby. Say it loud because saying it out loud reinforces the concept. Remember, for a lot of human history people actually only read the printed word out loud, thus hearing it twice. Say she’s a good baby again.
Where are her pacifiers going? I mean, seriously, where are they disappearing to? You used to be able to use a ruler to drag them all out from underneath her crib, but now the crib is so damn low that you can’t see if they are there, but they don’t seem to be. It’s logical to conclude that your baby is throwing her pacifiers into an extra dimension or something. She probably did it to spite you and naps and also because she’s a good baby.
Listen dad, get creative, she probably just tossed them across the room like a future major league softball player. You didn’t know she could underhand them that far did you. Query, is it okay to put said pacifier right back in the babe’s mouth? It probably is because you’re a dad. If you were a mom you would boil it or run it under water in the sink for a long period of time. You are a dad and you don’t have time for such trivial things. In your day kids used to walk backwards to school and eat dirt for breakfast or something like that.
Hey dad, watch out your baby is trying to climb the stairs. Lord knows you’re not putting in those baby gates because you think she could figure out stairs on her own. You are either trustworthy or lazy. Can’t it be both? So you wait until she clambers up a stair or two, takes one hand off to look back at you and wave her hand crazily before deciding to make sure that she doesn’t face plant. You spend the next fifteen minutes holding your hands carefully as she climbs up. Guess what? She doesn’t even come close to falling even once. What a waste of your time dad? You can think of a thousand other ways of wasting your time that would have been way less interesting.
Make sure to come up with nap times, dad. This child of yours needs a good nap time. Nap times are sacred things like Egyptian temples and Stonehenge and a really good iced coffee from McDonald’s. Don’t you eff this up you lazy bugger. Make sure to do chores during the first part of nap time because the your baby, good and all, probably won’t fall asleep right away, but you won’t be able to hear it if you’re taking out the trash and recycling and lamenting all the piece of shi- weeds that grow in your yard like, well, weeds. When you come back inside smack yourself in the forehead and say, “I can’t believe I didn’t bring the monitor.” But don’t really be serious about it because dads don’t need monitors. Dads have this crazy sixth sense that tells them when the baby is crying, and they use it frequently to do other chores or wake their wife up and tell them that the baby is crying. It’s super useful.
That’s all my advice today for all the dads out there. If you’re a dad it’s probably a good day to remember to call your father and tell him all the ways that he could have parented you better. Dads enjoy being reminded of all the time they wasted on you as a child. Trust me, he’ll want to hear from you until you start in. It will be like old times.
P.S. Remember that time you saw Wicked and started crying because the music was so effing beautiful and transcendent? You lost yourself some dad points there buddy. That was not dadly. Now pull up your socks, put on your hat, and man up.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Day Seven
On the seventh day, we rested. And then when we got bored of resting we rested some more. Mmmmmm.....smores. Anyhow, we didn't rest entirely that well because lil s decided that it was time to wake up for the day at 5:30 A.M. And, uh, I wasn't too excited about waking up at 5:30. That's in the vacation itinerary for the elderly not for young cappucino drinking folks like myself. Lil s didn't seem to mind crawling between me and her prone mother, pulling herself up and then doing some dancing. Needless to say the dancing was way less cute at 5:30 than it would have been at 8.
I took her downstairs for a bit, so she could share her love of making noise with the rest of the house. It was hard to tell from all the pillows being pulled over heads and slight groans, but I'm pretty certain that they liked it. Then I started eating cookies. This is one my great vacation weaknesses, I always take a vacation from eating healthy. I tend to get hungry before our late breakfasts, and so I'll eat five cookies to tide myself over until I have some egg heavy dish. I don't know if cookies and eggs will ever catch on, but they are pretty damn good when eaten as first and second breakfast, which is to say, to continue the Tolkein references, I become a hobbit, concerned with the meal between breakfast and brunch.
The moms and I took a brief walk up behind the house on a well worn dirt path. There was only one time where I was certain that a tree stump was a bear. We talked about the past on the dusty road, and watched the shade from trees slice shapes of light. In the end we talked again about things that had already happened because they are so much more likely to remain truer than the things that haven't. This may be the difference between a scientist and a man of words.
All afternoon we received calles from my in-laws offering updates on their travel back from Reno, which was supposed to have brought them back by ten. I told S that we should just hunker down, that if we traveled out to see them on the hike we'd only get fifteen minutes or so of it in. When we finally received the final call lil s was taking a nap, and, over my objections, we waited until she woke up to hit the road. By the time we reached them they'd finished the hike and were waiting in the parking lot. S congratulated me on not saying I told you so. "I don't have to say it because it's just so evident."
We hiked for a few minutes along a gravelly path cut through by rocks until we reached a view of of the Tahoe basin. It's at this point that you'd have to ask yourself whether the drive was worth it, the mountain range in the distance and the steely blue lake offered up their own take on it.
Back at the cabin we wound down quickly because we have babies. And babies are great at winding things down early. Ten o'clock never seemed like such a reasonable time to call it quits and accept that tomorrow would be a different if not necessarily better day.
Aside: it is strange to consider that you can now go an entire day without really having an original thought, that almost every moment of your day can be mediated by worry, radio, work, the internet, such that you wind up having no real time to process any of the information you are receiving, rather, you just become a paltry computer yourself, unable to draw distinctions, merely able to regurgitate the things you heard or the people who annoy you. That's why it's a good thing to write, to think, to spend a few moments reflecting on the veracity of things. Of course, I'm not really a doer either, so perhaps my problem is too much thinking.
Picture time
We took like ten of these suckers. Lil s apparently thought we were taking her mug shot and pretty much refused to smile despite the fact that her great grandmother was pretty pumped to see her. We put her in a timeout don't you worry, I've read about parenting on television.
These people are happy because they live in a recession proof housing market and work, at least one of them, at one of those nasty government jobs that are taking away all of our social security. They won't be smiling so much when we get back to the gold standard.
Tahoe may have impressed the Donner party and Chevrolet pick up trucks, but I smirk at that beauty.
Lil s is lucky we even let her in this picture the way she just jumped in at the last second. Oh what baby like you weren't going to be the center of attention for a minute. Come on! Like the guy in a six dollar hat is going to care! Come on!
We took five hundred more pictures of lil s with her gg because she was so terrible earlier. Naturally, just like her generation, note: it's important to always disparage the generations that come behind you and note how much better your generation was, even though it tends to be patently untrue, and often the reverse just looking at war stats and crime stats et al. Anyhow, kids from her generation just show not respect for their elders. It's depressing. In my day....
Music will save the world....just not this one.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Dictators tell stories about their youths
Dictators remember things
Irrespective of that time the real story stars round the time I was a little girl. It’s easy to forget as a man of seventy five years that you were once a little girl who carried around a blanket and had favorite dolls and other dolls that you occasionally called fat and locked away in a closet as some sort of obscure punishment. “It’s Ramadan” I used to yell to them through the slats in the door. You see, I wasn’t really the best sort of little girl, so I suppose that it’s in the interest of the world at large that I am now an old man.
That summer when I was round five or seven or so. The switch grass and horsetail had taken over the driveway. Other little girls would come by to play games of hop scotch with me, and I’d let them talk to those dolls of mine that had behaved and hadn’t been out whoring around the night before. I was the most popular of all the little girls because I was ruthless. I’d cheat at games of hop scotch, pull hair, send other little girls home crying, and I’d threaten them on the way home. “You tell anyone, and I’ll take care of it.”
I think even then I might have already been a seventy seven year old man trapped in a little girl’s body. It’s hard to remember. The dolls and I would sit in a circle and talk about the boys we had crushes on, and if one of them mentioned that they were kind of in love with one of the boys that I liked then I’d burn them with a match, to give you an idea of what sort of little girl I was.
My mother and father both worked. My father worked at a saw mill. He sawed old growth forest trees in half and made pieces of furniture out of them for half of what they were worth. Women used to protest outside of my father’s office, and I remember burning one of them when I was very small, and mom and I had gone over to pick him up from work. I waited until no one was paying attention, and lit something against the back of her calf, and I remember her screaming. That’s when I knew I was a witch of some kind because I didn’t have any matches, and I figured out pretty quickly that I’d better keep it a secret. People generally think witches are close personal friends of the devil, but I’ve only seen him a time or two in my life. Once he stopped me on the street in the North Beach of San Francisco and asked for some change to go watch a peep show. By that point in time I was a confident young woman, or maybe I was already becoming a man. The second time I saw him was in a grocery store, he was buying a package of cheap white sugar. I didn’t ask. It’s the devil’s own damn business if he wants to make cookies.
My mother was a school teacher. She taught kids who had all sorts of disorders, who pissed and shat themselves, and drew in crayon all over the wall. And even as a young girl I’d go into her classroom and help her repaint the walls because I knew that it was a good deed, and I considered all the bad things that I planned on doing if I was going to make something of myself, and I painted even more expertly.
Those afternoons were warm, and my mother would be sitting at her old particle board desk grading papers with a pair of bifocals hanging off the bridge of her nose. I think she just wore them for show. I suppose it’s this one in particular that you’re probably after. It’s the one that is sort of the genesis story.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Day Six
On the sixth day, we rested. No wait, that's supposed to the seventh day. On the sixth day I made grand plans to buy a second chocolate chip square and to go back to the used bookstore to buy reams and reams of Derrida and Foucault. However, we just packed up our stuff to get ready for the trip instead. Much of life is like that day. The best laid plans and such.
I spent the morning on google maps trying to find the prettiest route possible. I put a great deal of stock in pretty drives when I'm on vacation. I rarely take them because I'm a point A to point B kind of guy, but that doesn't mean I don't wish that I was the type of person who would take those scenic routes instead. Realizing that the moms and S would argue against taking the long and scenic route thereby ensuring that I got to take the point A to point B way, I argued vociferously for taking the scenic route. In the best of worlds the scenic route would also be the shortest. However, this gave me the best I could possibly get, since I both got to go the way I actually wanted to go while feeling like, had I not been thwarted, I would have been able to take the scenic route that I also desired. It's rare in life to at least get 2/3 of what you want.
We cut over through Grass Valley while the moms regaled us with stories of old trips to abandoned gold mines she'd taken while teaching junior high. The valley is what I would describe as quaint, ranch style houses set in and amongst the rising hills. We stopped briefly at a farm stand before turning onto the twenty to buy the most enormous blackberries that we'd ever seen. They probably just shipped them in from the local Safeway.
After a while I started complaining about how we could have taken a more scenic drive much to all passengers delight. Lil s was a real champion on this portion of the trip, playing with tags on her car seat or toys or singing to herself. We finally started to climb out of the valley and up towards the Sierras, and I pulled out at a scenic view because I am not the kind of person who pulls out at scenic views, and I wanted to teach myself a lesson about the sort of person I could be. While there we had a group of college guys ask us to take a picture. I begged off because I'm too hasty of a person to be a good photographer. I don't want to frame the shot. I just want the damn thing to get taken. S took it and upon arriving back in the car the moms noted that one of the gentleman was swinging a joint freely in his right hand. I guess I'm just too pure to notice that sort of thing.
The rest of the drive was a pleasant climb into the imposing granite sierras. The tops of the mountain are often sheer, bare of trees, and give you the feeling that if you were trapped on one you might sample one of your friends as well. We passed Donner Lake and Donner pass, and I wondered why they named it that, as if the memory were an honor. I suppose it's an inhibition we've sort of decided is appropriate almost world wide, that people are best left in the ground, though reasonably they have not much use left for that flesh. I've heard that sled dogs will not eat their own unless they've been stripped of skin and thus made to look like something else. The same cannot be said of trolls who dined on one another freely in the Lord of the Rings movies, which is, I suppose, why we're all happy that trolls don't run things.
As we neared Tahoe City the mood in the car picked up, the Truckee river flowing alongside carrying tourists down a particularly mild stretch.
By the time we reached the house it was 2 o'clock, and we set up in our rooms and chatted with family. Lil s was staying in an old Pack and Play that had a crappy plastic bottom that constantly came loose and was probably coated in asbestos. I think she liked it. The place had a hot tub, but I hadn't thought yet to use it. Lil s was the star attraction, greeting various family members with a smile or tears depending on her disposition and theirs.
I went outside for a while to take in the smell of the pines and to reflect on the trips I'd taken in my youth with my father to Tahoe. I remembered pine cones, long and cold afternoons for the season, green shrubs that we attacked with sticks, and games of Monopoly that were impossible to win and then the freezing cold lake, the gravel beaches, skipping rocks in late afternoon light.
We retired early as is the custom on vacation, eager to get enough sleep to awake before our little monster.
Picture time
Evidence that we stopped at the scenic viewpoint, which was worth being seen. Do you see what I did there?
I spent the morning on google maps trying to find the prettiest route possible. I put a great deal of stock in pretty drives when I'm on vacation. I rarely take them because I'm a point A to point B kind of guy, but that doesn't mean I don't wish that I was the type of person who would take those scenic routes instead. Realizing that the moms and S would argue against taking the long and scenic route thereby ensuring that I got to take the point A to point B way, I argued vociferously for taking the scenic route. In the best of worlds the scenic route would also be the shortest. However, this gave me the best I could possibly get, since I both got to go the way I actually wanted to go while feeling like, had I not been thwarted, I would have been able to take the scenic route that I also desired. It's rare in life to at least get 2/3 of what you want.
We cut over through Grass Valley while the moms regaled us with stories of old trips to abandoned gold mines she'd taken while teaching junior high. The valley is what I would describe as quaint, ranch style houses set in and amongst the rising hills. We stopped briefly at a farm stand before turning onto the twenty to buy the most enormous blackberries that we'd ever seen. They probably just shipped them in from the local Safeway.
After a while I started complaining about how we could have taken a more scenic drive much to all passengers delight. Lil s was a real champion on this portion of the trip, playing with tags on her car seat or toys or singing to herself. We finally started to climb out of the valley and up towards the Sierras, and I pulled out at a scenic view because I am not the kind of person who pulls out at scenic views, and I wanted to teach myself a lesson about the sort of person I could be. While there we had a group of college guys ask us to take a picture. I begged off because I'm too hasty of a person to be a good photographer. I don't want to frame the shot. I just want the damn thing to get taken. S took it and upon arriving back in the car the moms noted that one of the gentleman was swinging a joint freely in his right hand. I guess I'm just too pure to notice that sort of thing.
The rest of the drive was a pleasant climb into the imposing granite sierras. The tops of the mountain are often sheer, bare of trees, and give you the feeling that if you were trapped on one you might sample one of your friends as well. We passed Donner Lake and Donner pass, and I wondered why they named it that, as if the memory were an honor. I suppose it's an inhibition we've sort of decided is appropriate almost world wide, that people are best left in the ground, though reasonably they have not much use left for that flesh. I've heard that sled dogs will not eat their own unless they've been stripped of skin and thus made to look like something else. The same cannot be said of trolls who dined on one another freely in the Lord of the Rings movies, which is, I suppose, why we're all happy that trolls don't run things.
As we neared Tahoe City the mood in the car picked up, the Truckee river flowing alongside carrying tourists down a particularly mild stretch.
By the time we reached the house it was 2 o'clock, and we set up in our rooms and chatted with family. Lil s was staying in an old Pack and Play that had a crappy plastic bottom that constantly came loose and was probably coated in asbestos. I think she liked it. The place had a hot tub, but I hadn't thought yet to use it. Lil s was the star attraction, greeting various family members with a smile or tears depending on her disposition and theirs.
I went outside for a while to take in the smell of the pines and to reflect on the trips I'd taken in my youth with my father to Tahoe. I remembered pine cones, long and cold afternoons for the season, green shrubs that we attacked with sticks, and games of Monopoly that were impossible to win and then the freezing cold lake, the gravel beaches, skipping rocks in late afternoon light.
We retired early as is the custom on vacation, eager to get enough sleep to awake before our little monster.
Picture time
Evidence that we stopped at the scenic viewpoint, which was worth being seen. Do you see what I did there?
Friday, August 26, 2011
Day 5
The morning is probably brisk. Somewhere in the green bushes birds are twittering about nothing. We have slept the peaceful sleep of the damned. Lil s has been having good nights as the room the moms has put her in is nearly pitch black. We've also equipped her with a white noise making fan to try and make her as dependent on it as we are. I suppose we'll pass that on to her along with the poor eyesight.
We start out by heading over to a local coffee shop cutely named Bidwell Perk in honor of the park it practically abuts. I go there to get these ice cream coffee type monstrosities called blizzards that turn out to not be as good this time as I remembered. But I suppose that's true of almost everything in life, it is rarely as good as you'd remembered. That said, the morning is pleasant. Lil s is fascinated by a fountain and charms the local middle aged women who primarily eat at the place. My mom tells us the top fifteen brunch places in town because she's retired now and an expert on brunch.
Whenever I'm in Chico I try and head downtown and buy some books at the used bookstore. I like to buy books at the used bookstore because books are my thing. You probably have a thing as well, maybe it's cookware, or vegetables, or eating out, or whatever, my thing is books. S doesn't exactly like my thing because she feels that books take up too much room, and she's always reminding me that I work at a library and that the books are free there. I don't judge a book by its cover but I do judge a person by the quality of the content on their bookshelves. Again, I was born to be an independently wealthy country gentleman and instead find myself treading water in late stage capitalism as a middle class normy. That's the term we country gentleman use for the middle class folks who work at jobs that are kind of meh, and who have opinions about things in the world, which aren't really strong enough to make too much of a difference and who complain about things like mortgage, car payments, house projects, child care costs etc. Wouldn't it be more fun to go hunt some foxes?
Anyhow, I manage to limit myself to only three books, one of which happens to be The Histories by Herodotus. And it's just the sort of thing that a pseudo intellectual will go in for. Hilariously, my brother-in-law later described men in their early fifties reading Noam Chomsky at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday and just sort of wondering what the heck they were actually doing. I can't wait to read Chomsky at 3 on a Tuesday. Ah, to be useless. Anyhow, after that the moms and S went by the store Made in Chico. (Chico is the sort of place that has a bunch of local stores downtown, and someone even once tossed a brick through the window of a Wendy's that got put in. That is to say, like parts of the Northeast, they place a very high value on keeping things local. It's a kind of hippieish religion that's taken hold and which I'm mostly supportive of.
In the meantime I head over to the other used bookstore. The second used bookstore is amazing, lined with cloth Melville, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hawthorne, Woolf, Eliot, the whole lot of them. Unfortunately I've run out of room in my bag. (We only carry on now like everyone else who flies regardless of how giant our carry on's actually get. Oh this, yeah, no, this horse is my carry on. My personal item is his colt). So I just get to walk through the musty shelves and trace the names of authors that I've loved. I leave after twenty minutes or so and try and make sure the guy behind the desk doesn't think I'm stealing anything. Luckily, I don't have any bags or anything that would make him think that I'm stealing something. Perhaps my fear of people thinking that I'll steal something is in fact merely a manifestation of my latent desire to steal something. (The last two times I've been at Whole Foods I've eaten a cookie while shopping for groceries and not mentioned it to the clerk. I mean, the place is called Whole Paycheck by folks for a reason. Stealing food is morally ambiguous right? Although perhaps the loaf of bread for the starving family is more ambiguous than the oatmeal raisin cookie for the slightly hungry normy).
We join up in time for me to buy a bunch of stuff with my credit card. Our new credit card is mileage plus, so I'm happy to pay for everything. I don't think I quite understand it completely as of yet, but I'm fairly certain the thing pays for itself. It's like we're making money by spending it. We retired after this brief forray because s will melt if she doesn't get a nap, a fact, which I'd debate with S more if I was the one who had to feed her at night if she doesn't sleep well. I tend to be the more relaxed parent when it comes to worrying about naps, feedings, diaper changes, teeth, and cracks in the wall.
We sit around the house for a while until I get impatient and make us go for a walk in the heat of the day. For some odd reason I drive us to upper park and take us on a death march through the star thistle and dry golden grass as opposed to the more shaded lower park. At some point someone mentions rattle snakes, and I spend the next five minutes trying not to look as though I'm jumpy even though I'm jumpy. Luckily I'm pushing a happy gurgling lil s in front of me like a shield.
After a while it's clear that we're headed for a reenactment of something like the Donner party, we're at least three hundred feet from the car, when we finally reach a shady patch and backtrack through the shady portion of the park past the trickle of the creek, where sun bathers sit on an inflatable plastic toys and drink cokes or beers.
On the ride back to the car we see another swing and so push s in it for a while. The moms talks a great deal about which portions of the playground are shaded. She also points out, as I was parking the car, which parts of the lot will allow for the most shade. This is the moms version of books, shade and air flow. I blame it on her red hair. Red hair that lil s seems to have as well. It teaches those fair-skinned folk a healthy fear of the sun that grows into mania. We push her on the swing for a while, and she seems to like it. I'm just happy she doesn't cry like when I throw her in the air. Then she just panics.
In the evening we sit in the backyard and talk about jobs, places we've lived, and lil s. One thing we discovered is that she wants to pet kitties. The thing about the moms kitty is that he's a bit untrustworthy. Well, in general he behaves like a dog, coming when you call him and rubbing himself up against you in order to be petted. However, when he disappeared for two years, lord only knows where he lived, he got a bit more of an attitude and has been known to nip. Lil s has been known to pretend to be petting something only to latch on in some sort of crazy baby vice grip and then yank. We didn't think putting the two of them together was the best idea. Though, when S wasn't around I let lil s have a little more leeway, and she did just fine beyond some surface cuts. Anyhow, whenever she could see the cat she pretty much wanted to pet him. And sometimes he'd walk away, or we'd hold her arms back to try and show her how to be gentle and she'd start squalling as if we had taken away her favorite little blanket, and I suggested regular spankings to remedy the problem, but was revoked on the grounds that she was "just a baby." At which point I retired to the room with a good book and my vacation hat like any good father.
Picture time
Yeah, we put her hair up in this little blow because we love the movie Monster's Inc. Okay, that's not entirely true.
This is the fountain that lil s loved. We were all just happy he wasn't pissing like he would have been if we were in Europe. Dirty Euros.
Then we headed off to the plaza in Chico where all the cool hippies and drunks used to hang out at that is now paved over so that little kids and babies are there. It's taken a turn for the worse.
This is the happiest my mom was on the whole walk. Note that we're shaded.
These are my girls looking cute. Because anything less is not accepted in my house!
We start out by heading over to a local coffee shop cutely named Bidwell Perk in honor of the park it practically abuts. I go there to get these ice cream coffee type monstrosities called blizzards that turn out to not be as good this time as I remembered. But I suppose that's true of almost everything in life, it is rarely as good as you'd remembered. That said, the morning is pleasant. Lil s is fascinated by a fountain and charms the local middle aged women who primarily eat at the place. My mom tells us the top fifteen brunch places in town because she's retired now and an expert on brunch.
Whenever I'm in Chico I try and head downtown and buy some books at the used bookstore. I like to buy books at the used bookstore because books are my thing. You probably have a thing as well, maybe it's cookware, or vegetables, or eating out, or whatever, my thing is books. S doesn't exactly like my thing because she feels that books take up too much room, and she's always reminding me that I work at a library and that the books are free there. I don't judge a book by its cover but I do judge a person by the quality of the content on their bookshelves. Again, I was born to be an independently wealthy country gentleman and instead find myself treading water in late stage capitalism as a middle class normy. That's the term we country gentleman use for the middle class folks who work at jobs that are kind of meh, and who have opinions about things in the world, which aren't really strong enough to make too much of a difference and who complain about things like mortgage, car payments, house projects, child care costs etc. Wouldn't it be more fun to go hunt some foxes?
Anyhow, I manage to limit myself to only three books, one of which happens to be The Histories by Herodotus. And it's just the sort of thing that a pseudo intellectual will go in for. Hilariously, my brother-in-law later described men in their early fifties reading Noam Chomsky at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday and just sort of wondering what the heck they were actually doing. I can't wait to read Chomsky at 3 on a Tuesday. Ah, to be useless. Anyhow, after that the moms and S went by the store Made in Chico. (Chico is the sort of place that has a bunch of local stores downtown, and someone even once tossed a brick through the window of a Wendy's that got put in. That is to say, like parts of the Northeast, they place a very high value on keeping things local. It's a kind of hippieish religion that's taken hold and which I'm mostly supportive of.
In the meantime I head over to the other used bookstore. The second used bookstore is amazing, lined with cloth Melville, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hawthorne, Woolf, Eliot, the whole lot of them. Unfortunately I've run out of room in my bag. (We only carry on now like everyone else who flies regardless of how giant our carry on's actually get. Oh this, yeah, no, this horse is my carry on. My personal item is his colt). So I just get to walk through the musty shelves and trace the names of authors that I've loved. I leave after twenty minutes or so and try and make sure the guy behind the desk doesn't think I'm stealing anything. Luckily, I don't have any bags or anything that would make him think that I'm stealing something. Perhaps my fear of people thinking that I'll steal something is in fact merely a manifestation of my latent desire to steal something. (The last two times I've been at Whole Foods I've eaten a cookie while shopping for groceries and not mentioned it to the clerk. I mean, the place is called Whole Paycheck by folks for a reason. Stealing food is morally ambiguous right? Although perhaps the loaf of bread for the starving family is more ambiguous than the oatmeal raisin cookie for the slightly hungry normy).
We join up in time for me to buy a bunch of stuff with my credit card. Our new credit card is mileage plus, so I'm happy to pay for everything. I don't think I quite understand it completely as of yet, but I'm fairly certain the thing pays for itself. It's like we're making money by spending it. We retired after this brief forray because s will melt if she doesn't get a nap, a fact, which I'd debate with S more if I was the one who had to feed her at night if she doesn't sleep well. I tend to be the more relaxed parent when it comes to worrying about naps, feedings, diaper changes, teeth, and cracks in the wall.
We sit around the house for a while until I get impatient and make us go for a walk in the heat of the day. For some odd reason I drive us to upper park and take us on a death march through the star thistle and dry golden grass as opposed to the more shaded lower park. At some point someone mentions rattle snakes, and I spend the next five minutes trying not to look as though I'm jumpy even though I'm jumpy. Luckily I'm pushing a happy gurgling lil s in front of me like a shield.
After a while it's clear that we're headed for a reenactment of something like the Donner party, we're at least three hundred feet from the car, when we finally reach a shady patch and backtrack through the shady portion of the park past the trickle of the creek, where sun bathers sit on an inflatable plastic toys and drink cokes or beers.
On the ride back to the car we see another swing and so push s in it for a while. The moms talks a great deal about which portions of the playground are shaded. She also points out, as I was parking the car, which parts of the lot will allow for the most shade. This is the moms version of books, shade and air flow. I blame it on her red hair. Red hair that lil s seems to have as well. It teaches those fair-skinned folk a healthy fear of the sun that grows into mania. We push her on the swing for a while, and she seems to like it. I'm just happy she doesn't cry like when I throw her in the air. Then she just panics.
In the evening we sit in the backyard and talk about jobs, places we've lived, and lil s. One thing we discovered is that she wants to pet kitties. The thing about the moms kitty is that he's a bit untrustworthy. Well, in general he behaves like a dog, coming when you call him and rubbing himself up against you in order to be petted. However, when he disappeared for two years, lord only knows where he lived, he got a bit more of an attitude and has been known to nip. Lil s has been known to pretend to be petting something only to latch on in some sort of crazy baby vice grip and then yank. We didn't think putting the two of them together was the best idea. Though, when S wasn't around I let lil s have a little more leeway, and she did just fine beyond some surface cuts. Anyhow, whenever she could see the cat she pretty much wanted to pet him. And sometimes he'd walk away, or we'd hold her arms back to try and show her how to be gentle and she'd start squalling as if we had taken away her favorite little blanket, and I suggested regular spankings to remedy the problem, but was revoked on the grounds that she was "just a baby." At which point I retired to the room with a good book and my vacation hat like any good father.
Picture time
Yeah, we put her hair up in this little blow because we love the movie Monster's Inc. Okay, that's not entirely true.
This is the fountain that lil s loved. We were all just happy he wasn't pissing like he would have been if we were in Europe. Dirty Euros.
Then we headed off to the plaza in Chico where all the cool hippies and drunks used to hang out at that is now paved over so that little kids and babies are there. It's taken a turn for the worse.
This is the happiest my mom was on the whole walk. Note that we're shaded.
These are my girls looking cute. Because anything less is not accepted in my house!
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Day Four/Conversations about lines
M: (Gets out of shower and into towel) Do you like what you see?
S: (Doesn't really bother to look up) You bet.
M: Well, you'll have to get in line then.
S: Who else is in line?
M: Well. No one. But it still seems like a line would be best.
I read an article recently that talked about the ability of those bygone great American writers to write about America best from foreign shores. I suppose that is true of just about anyone. When I left my hometown of Chico, CA, I wouldn't say I thought that I was leaving much behind me beyond a small group of friends and my mother. I found most of the people in my age bracket to be, not idiots, just foreign, interested in different things. I found myself at college etc. etc. Anyhow, the point is that it takes a rare breed of person to be able to appreciate a place's beauty while they are inside it. It is only absent the unceasing pleasant days of Santa Barbara that I can appreciate how wonderful it was. The same seems to ring true of the places that we are from.
This all brings me to day four. When I awoke and walked out to pick up the paper the air was brisk. Not those damnably hot garbage sack mornings I'd left behind. This cool morning air inspired me to take a walk to the doughnut nook, a favorite little place from summers long ago, back before we were able to drink when my friends and I would stay up late playing video games and then head over to the nook around 1 A.M. to eat doughnuts and bullsh- about things for an hour or so.
I took mom and babe with me because S has grown to love the doughnut nook's amazing creation as much as I do: a chocolate chip square. A chocolate chip square is a giant rectangular doughnut, think bear claw sized but rectangular in shape, topped with chocolate glaze. Okay, nothing special here, you've just got yourself a big ass doughnut, but then they stuff the thing full of warm chocolate chips. I tend to eat them quickly so as to avoid letting my body realize that my arteries are being actively clogged. I can recommend the peanut butter one as well because it's a little richer, and when you're talking about a giant chocolate glazed doughnut filled with chocolate chips you're definitely thinking, "how can I make this richer?" Back in the day of high school metabolisms we used to drink it with whole milk as well. This particular morning we walked the mile or so there and back to try and alleviate some of the impact of the crater of chocolate and fried dough had left in our stomachs.
After that, strangely enough, we sat around the house and waited for a lot of those same high school friends that I'd left behind to swing by the house with wives in tow to say hi to little s. It's almost laughable to watch all of us men interacting with wives, or at least the presence of wives, the jokes lack a certain sting, a certain element of retrogradity, that's a word now. I'm reminded of how we'll all get together in a few weeks in Nashville and act like nothing has changed. We'll exchanged booze for doughnuts and sit around and bullshi- about the old days and hope that someone does something so colossally stupid that we'll all be able to recount it for years to come.
Anyhow, we watched baby s stumble around the room, smile, eat magazines, cry, et al. and bitched about politics or houses or our lot in life. You know the same sort of shi- that people have been doing since language was invented.
Before my friends arrived I remember being annoyed at S and my mom for some reason and claiming that I was on vacation and putting on my Lake Tahoe hat and sitting in the back yard. I watched small nameless birds flit between shrubs and onto the branches of white nameless trees. It is good to know things I am always reminding myself.
After that a set of S's friends came over who randomly happened to be in the area. And we bs'd about different sorts of things because the new folks all work in the field of Christian missions in one way or another. In the end we wound up talking a bit about kids, the men about writing or not writing until the afternoon whittled itself away.
At that point we went for a walk in Bidwell Park, which is the --- largest municipal park in the country. I think top ten. Anyhow, it's huge. And I don't think I ever appreciated how awesome it was until I left. Chico has only 80,000 people or so, but the park runs the length of the city giving easy access to kids who want to bike, skip rocks, jump dangerously from ropes, I never did, obviously, or take a country stroll and botanize the shi- out of things. I never did that either.
We wound up going to a place where the babies could swing, and I pushed lil s for the first time in one of those baby swings, and she sort of liked it, but even though I acted calm and happy I was continually worried that she was going to pitch forward to her death. Don't tell anyone I thought that. I love caution.
In the evening we went to Burger Hut, this pretty damn good burger place that has probably gotten a little pricey for its britches, but that I still love as I remember going there when I was younger and attempting to eat a whole order of their seemingly unending french fries. I have dreams about the heaps of potatoes slain to make my dinner. There we chatted a bit about the things people chat about when two babies are present, babies, the past, old memories and the things we don't yet know about each other because we've been absent so long.
In the evening we tried to watch Toy Story 3, a movie I've managed to watch twice without S even though she loves herself some car toon movies. Mainly because they are happy. And she puts a great deal of stock in movies that have hope. I don't put a great deal of stock in hope, so I suppose that's where we differ. "Yes, there is hope -- endless hope. But not for us" Thank you my good friend Mr. Kakfa. Anyhow, the picture kept coming in and out and freezing and S has a tendency to act as if she's being punched repeatedly in the face when the screen freezes, so she left the room in a huff. I've never seen her as upset about anything as she gets about our screen freezing. I suppose that's a good thing. My mother and I stayed awake for a while talking about lil s and jobs and CA. Then we both headed off to sleep.
Picture Time!
Cute story. So I asked the moms to pull out pictures of me from my long lost babyhood and the first picture she pulls out is one of me as a wee babe playing with the same toy that lil s was playing with. I guess it just doesn't just get any better than a round ball made for rolling/smashing stuff.
We've taught her that eating rocks makes you stronger like that guy in the Neverending Story. Did he eat rocks?
Mainly when the moms tried to hold lil s she attempted to scramble away to go eat some rocks. She's crafty like that. She paused a couple of times to pose for a picture.
It's hard to tell from this picture, but I'm on vacation wearing my Lake Tahoe hat. Beer me. I kid. I'll take a chardonnay.
Externally: This ain't no thing.
Internally: Is she going to fall? What percentage of your brain can you lose in a swing accident and still get a full ride to a UC? IS anyone noticing how nervous I am? Why isn't she nervous?
Toddlers pushing babies in strollers is why calendars were invented. You can buy one for 9.95 on this website.
S: (Doesn't really bother to look up) You bet.
M: Well, you'll have to get in line then.
S: Who else is in line?
M: Well. No one. But it still seems like a line would be best.
I read an article recently that talked about the ability of those bygone great American writers to write about America best from foreign shores. I suppose that is true of just about anyone. When I left my hometown of Chico, CA, I wouldn't say I thought that I was leaving much behind me beyond a small group of friends and my mother. I found most of the people in my age bracket to be, not idiots, just foreign, interested in different things. I found myself at college etc. etc. Anyhow, the point is that it takes a rare breed of person to be able to appreciate a place's beauty while they are inside it. It is only absent the unceasing pleasant days of Santa Barbara that I can appreciate how wonderful it was. The same seems to ring true of the places that we are from.
This all brings me to day four. When I awoke and walked out to pick up the paper the air was brisk. Not those damnably hot garbage sack mornings I'd left behind. This cool morning air inspired me to take a walk to the doughnut nook, a favorite little place from summers long ago, back before we were able to drink when my friends and I would stay up late playing video games and then head over to the nook around 1 A.M. to eat doughnuts and bullsh- about things for an hour or so.
I took mom and babe with me because S has grown to love the doughnut nook's amazing creation as much as I do: a chocolate chip square. A chocolate chip square is a giant rectangular doughnut, think bear claw sized but rectangular in shape, topped with chocolate glaze. Okay, nothing special here, you've just got yourself a big ass doughnut, but then they stuff the thing full of warm chocolate chips. I tend to eat them quickly so as to avoid letting my body realize that my arteries are being actively clogged. I can recommend the peanut butter one as well because it's a little richer, and when you're talking about a giant chocolate glazed doughnut filled with chocolate chips you're definitely thinking, "how can I make this richer?" Back in the day of high school metabolisms we used to drink it with whole milk as well. This particular morning we walked the mile or so there and back to try and alleviate some of the impact of the crater of chocolate and fried dough had left in our stomachs.
After that, strangely enough, we sat around the house and waited for a lot of those same high school friends that I'd left behind to swing by the house with wives in tow to say hi to little s. It's almost laughable to watch all of us men interacting with wives, or at least the presence of wives, the jokes lack a certain sting, a certain element of retrogradity, that's a word now. I'm reminded of how we'll all get together in a few weeks in Nashville and act like nothing has changed. We'll exchanged booze for doughnuts and sit around and bullshi- about the old days and hope that someone does something so colossally stupid that we'll all be able to recount it for years to come.
Anyhow, we watched baby s stumble around the room, smile, eat magazines, cry, et al. and bitched about politics or houses or our lot in life. You know the same sort of shi- that people have been doing since language was invented.
Before my friends arrived I remember being annoyed at S and my mom for some reason and claiming that I was on vacation and putting on my Lake Tahoe hat and sitting in the back yard. I watched small nameless birds flit between shrubs and onto the branches of white nameless trees. It is good to know things I am always reminding myself.
After that a set of S's friends came over who randomly happened to be in the area. And we bs'd about different sorts of things because the new folks all work in the field of Christian missions in one way or another. In the end we wound up talking a bit about kids, the men about writing or not writing until the afternoon whittled itself away.
At that point we went for a walk in Bidwell Park, which is the --- largest municipal park in the country. I think top ten. Anyhow, it's huge. And I don't think I ever appreciated how awesome it was until I left. Chico has only 80,000 people or so, but the park runs the length of the city giving easy access to kids who want to bike, skip rocks, jump dangerously from ropes, I never did, obviously, or take a country stroll and botanize the shi- out of things. I never did that either.
We wound up going to a place where the babies could swing, and I pushed lil s for the first time in one of those baby swings, and she sort of liked it, but even though I acted calm and happy I was continually worried that she was going to pitch forward to her death. Don't tell anyone I thought that. I love caution.
In the evening we went to Burger Hut, this pretty damn good burger place that has probably gotten a little pricey for its britches, but that I still love as I remember going there when I was younger and attempting to eat a whole order of their seemingly unending french fries. I have dreams about the heaps of potatoes slain to make my dinner. There we chatted a bit about the things people chat about when two babies are present, babies, the past, old memories and the things we don't yet know about each other because we've been absent so long.
In the evening we tried to watch Toy Story 3, a movie I've managed to watch twice without S even though she loves herself some car toon movies. Mainly because they are happy. And she puts a great deal of stock in movies that have hope. I don't put a great deal of stock in hope, so I suppose that's where we differ. "Yes, there is hope -- endless hope. But not for us" Thank you my good friend Mr. Kakfa. Anyhow, the picture kept coming in and out and freezing and S has a tendency to act as if she's being punched repeatedly in the face when the screen freezes, so she left the room in a huff. I've never seen her as upset about anything as she gets about our screen freezing. I suppose that's a good thing. My mother and I stayed awake for a while talking about lil s and jobs and CA. Then we both headed off to sleep.
Picture Time!
Cute story. So I asked the moms to pull out pictures of me from my long lost babyhood and the first picture she pulls out is one of me as a wee babe playing with the same toy that lil s was playing with. I guess it just doesn't just get any better than a round ball made for rolling/smashing stuff.
We've taught her that eating rocks makes you stronger like that guy in the Neverending Story. Did he eat rocks?
Mainly when the moms tried to hold lil s she attempted to scramble away to go eat some rocks. She's crafty like that. She paused a couple of times to pose for a picture.
It's hard to tell from this picture, but I'm on vacation wearing my Lake Tahoe hat. Beer me. I kid. I'll take a chardonnay.
Externally: This ain't no thing.
Internally: Is she going to fall? What percentage of your brain can you lose in a swing accident and still get a full ride to a UC? IS anyone noticing how nervous I am? Why isn't she nervous?
Toddlers pushing babies in strollers is why calendars were invented. You can buy one for 9.95 on this website.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Day Three CA trip/Everything you need to know about Kim Kardashian's wedding
Everything you need to know about Kim Kardashian's Wedding
S: You cursed a lot in that last blog.
M: I was attempting to use a certain tone to give it more humor.
S: What were you hoping to achieve with that humor.
M: I'm basically trying to distract people from the almost horrifying reality that they are the central being in only their own narrative. To take away for a moment the reality that we are tiny collections of atoms in a vast universe. That the fact that we exist is really a kind of cosmic joke.
S: Really?
M: Maybe not, but it's a pretty good answer right.
We woke up for our third day ready to hit the road. This means that we were up by ten. Lil s probably woke up earlier and shouted at us over the top of her pack and play because that's the sort of thing she does the little ingrate. After that we headed downstairs and ate breakfast at the godly hour of ten thirty. Let's be honest, monks have it all wrong, the good Lord wants us to eat brunch every day not wake up at 3 A.M. At least the proto-Western God that I prefer to worship when I'm buying myself Lattes and people watching.
Then we tried to convince my father to drive to Santa Cruz. My father's fear of traffic rivals our own fear of the 495 on weekends, and so we settled on Sunset State Beach. The drive out to the beach was nice, golden hills, live oaks and great oaks, fog thick on the coast. You know, your basic CA beauty so absent on the opposite coast.
Unfortunately, upon viewing the fog it occurred to me that I'd forgotten to bring my sweatshirt. Of course, there's no use in bringing only my sweatshirt because S will take that from me. So I'd actually forgotten to bring not only my sweatshirt but also my backup sweatshirt. I don't know at what point in history it was established that being manly meant not being cold, but I get cold and want my sweatshirt.
On the way we passed through an agricultural town with a bunch of people out enjoying some nice U pick. Of course the U pick appeared a bit strange because the people just gave back the baskets of fruit and were out there for six hours or so. I guess U picks are just different on the west coast.
Sunset State beach was swathed in fog, and we ate our lunch next to people who were doing the holy work of grilling while we passed cold sandwiches back and forth and wrapped ourselves in towels. I don't know what prevents people from inviting me to their BBQ's. I love them. I guess not knowing them. People need to read on the Gospel about giving to the hungry and needy and afflicted with turkey sandwiches when hot hamburgers lie only a few feet away.
We then headed off to the beach portion of the beach, which was not crawling with a bunch of filthy insects or large families with beach umbrellas and tan kids skim boarding as you might know them. We were excited to put s down on the beach because we were fairly certain she'd be able to get lunch and dinner provided her all from the wonder of sand. Much to our dismay she merely crawled around on the sand and ran her hands through it with a look of wonder that was reminiscent of a drinker finding a hidden bottle of wine.
I'm not a big fan of sand. I'm no fan of rocks either. I don't know why they can't make the beach out of that nice recycled rubber from old tires. That beach would be amazing! No disgusting sand or annoying rocks just old mother nature recycled via tires onto your feet.
Anyhow, then we took s down to the beach to try and scare her and teach her about the dangers of drowning. Sadly she just smiled when the waves crept up around her knees.
M: You're getting your pants wet.
s: Gurgles in delight.
M: That's not a good thing.
s: Looks excitedly for the next wave.
After a completely unsuccessful lesson we took a walk down the beach and lo and behold we found a large swath of wide open beach. Mainly because people are too lazy to walk that far down. Anyhow, I was commenting on how great the Pacific was when S said, "The ocean just looks like the ocean." And I had to correct and remind her that the Pacific was amazing and the Atlantic was referred to by seamen as the "green sea of death." I'm not sure why they changed the name. Or something like that.
After a long day at the beach we headed back to San Jose and packed up for our next adventure in my hometown of Chico.First we stopped off at Denny's for dinner though because Denny's is the greatest place ever if you're on a road trip though we'd never ever go to one if we weren't on a road trip. What is it about road trips that makes certain things sanctionable that aren't otherwise like Denny's, fast food, yelling obscenities in multiple languages at anyone going under 55, threatening your family with the ball and chain if they don't stop whining, enjoying golden hills. It's kind of a mystery.
We met my mom in Dunnigan Gap, which has a population of around 200 and who's only claim to fame is a now closed restaurant. It's kind of like the Arlington of Northern CA. Anyhow, on the way out of the Wendy's we noticed a bunch of kittens in the parking lot just wandering around. I tried to get my dad to take one because he has like nine cats that he feeds as it is but he refused. So I drove by the lil kittens scavenging in the drive thru area to make myself feel bad. It worked. Then we drove on into the night.
Picture time (No kittens were harmed or adopted)
Lil s and I are still working out on the kinks, but I've at least got her leading with the jab.
More importantly you follow that up with a smile Muhammad Ali style, like buddy, I can trade punches all night. She's a natural. I think it's fair to say that most dads want their daughters to grow up to be professional boxers.
Oh hello empty coast line. Where are all the east coasters crawling all over the place like ants. Where is that place where I can rent an umbrella and put it down right next to someone else with an umbrella? Where are all the tattoos?
We've got an offer in on this one. I think my library salary will probably be what puts us over the top.
I'm watching you s. I know that you lead with a smile and then surreptitiously eat sand, and I can respect that.
Hi baby
S: An ocean just looks like an ocean
M: No. This is the good one.
This is the part where I teach s how to be serious and that water safety is no accident.
Unfortunately she loved it. I mean, at the very least the water was cold lil s. Come on! Plus I ruined my fancy pickin' up dudes/being homeless jeans.
My peeps
It's illegal to pick California poppies. But it's not illegal to smash them with a pine cone attached to a stick. Okay, it might be. I'm no law expert. I am an expert at smashing things though.
S: You cursed a lot in that last blog.
M: I was attempting to use a certain tone to give it more humor.
S: What were you hoping to achieve with that humor.
M: I'm basically trying to distract people from the almost horrifying reality that they are the central being in only their own narrative. To take away for a moment the reality that we are tiny collections of atoms in a vast universe. That the fact that we exist is really a kind of cosmic joke.
S: Really?
M: Maybe not, but it's a pretty good answer right.
We woke up for our third day ready to hit the road. This means that we were up by ten. Lil s probably woke up earlier and shouted at us over the top of her pack and play because that's the sort of thing she does the little ingrate. After that we headed downstairs and ate breakfast at the godly hour of ten thirty. Let's be honest, monks have it all wrong, the good Lord wants us to eat brunch every day not wake up at 3 A.M. At least the proto-Western God that I prefer to worship when I'm buying myself Lattes and people watching.
Then we tried to convince my father to drive to Santa Cruz. My father's fear of traffic rivals our own fear of the 495 on weekends, and so we settled on Sunset State Beach. The drive out to the beach was nice, golden hills, live oaks and great oaks, fog thick on the coast. You know, your basic CA beauty so absent on the opposite coast.
Unfortunately, upon viewing the fog it occurred to me that I'd forgotten to bring my sweatshirt. Of course, there's no use in bringing only my sweatshirt because S will take that from me. So I'd actually forgotten to bring not only my sweatshirt but also my backup sweatshirt. I don't know at what point in history it was established that being manly meant not being cold, but I get cold and want my sweatshirt.
On the way we passed through an agricultural town with a bunch of people out enjoying some nice U pick. Of course the U pick appeared a bit strange because the people just gave back the baskets of fruit and were out there for six hours or so. I guess U picks are just different on the west coast.
Sunset State beach was swathed in fog, and we ate our lunch next to people who were doing the holy work of grilling while we passed cold sandwiches back and forth and wrapped ourselves in towels. I don't know what prevents people from inviting me to their BBQ's. I love them. I guess not knowing them. People need to read on the Gospel about giving to the hungry and needy and afflicted with turkey sandwiches when hot hamburgers lie only a few feet away.
We then headed off to the beach portion of the beach, which was not crawling with a bunch of filthy insects or large families with beach umbrellas and tan kids skim boarding as you might know them. We were excited to put s down on the beach because we were fairly certain she'd be able to get lunch and dinner provided her all from the wonder of sand. Much to our dismay she merely crawled around on the sand and ran her hands through it with a look of wonder that was reminiscent of a drinker finding a hidden bottle of wine.
I'm not a big fan of sand. I'm no fan of rocks either. I don't know why they can't make the beach out of that nice recycled rubber from old tires. That beach would be amazing! No disgusting sand or annoying rocks just old mother nature recycled via tires onto your feet.
Anyhow, then we took s down to the beach to try and scare her and teach her about the dangers of drowning. Sadly she just smiled when the waves crept up around her knees.
M: You're getting your pants wet.
s: Gurgles in delight.
M: That's not a good thing.
s: Looks excitedly for the next wave.
After a completely unsuccessful lesson we took a walk down the beach and lo and behold we found a large swath of wide open beach. Mainly because people are too lazy to walk that far down. Anyhow, I was commenting on how great the Pacific was when S said, "The ocean just looks like the ocean." And I had to correct and remind her that the Pacific was amazing and the Atlantic was referred to by seamen as the "green sea of death." I'm not sure why they changed the name. Or something like that.
After a long day at the beach we headed back to San Jose and packed up for our next adventure in my hometown of Chico.First we stopped off at Denny's for dinner though because Denny's is the greatest place ever if you're on a road trip though we'd never ever go to one if we weren't on a road trip. What is it about road trips that makes certain things sanctionable that aren't otherwise like Denny's, fast food, yelling obscenities in multiple languages at anyone going under 55, threatening your family with the ball and chain if they don't stop whining, enjoying golden hills. It's kind of a mystery.
We met my mom in Dunnigan Gap, which has a population of around 200 and who's only claim to fame is a now closed restaurant. It's kind of like the Arlington of Northern CA. Anyhow, on the way out of the Wendy's we noticed a bunch of kittens in the parking lot just wandering around. I tried to get my dad to take one because he has like nine cats that he feeds as it is but he refused. So I drove by the lil kittens scavenging in the drive thru area to make myself feel bad. It worked. Then we drove on into the night.
Picture time (No kittens were harmed or adopted)
Lil s and I are still working out on the kinks, but I've at least got her leading with the jab.
More importantly you follow that up with a smile Muhammad Ali style, like buddy, I can trade punches all night. She's a natural. I think it's fair to say that most dads want their daughters to grow up to be professional boxers.
Oh hello empty coast line. Where are all the east coasters crawling all over the place like ants. Where is that place where I can rent an umbrella and put it down right next to someone else with an umbrella? Where are all the tattoos?
We've got an offer in on this one. I think my library salary will probably be what puts us over the top.
I'm watching you s. I know that you lead with a smile and then surreptitiously eat sand, and I can respect that.
Hi baby
S: An ocean just looks like an ocean
M: No. This is the good one.
This is the part where I teach s how to be serious and that water safety is no accident.
Unfortunately she loved it. I mean, at the very least the water was cold lil s. Come on! Plus I ruined my fancy pickin' up dudes/being homeless jeans.
My peeps
It's illegal to pick California poppies. But it's not illegal to smash them with a pine cone attached to a stick. Okay, it might be. I'm no law expert. I am an expert at smashing things though.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Day Two
12:00-much later-By the time S and s nod off the movie on the plane has started. I miss the first thirty minutes of Thor, but it got like in the seventies on rotten tomatoes, so I decided to put the headphones in and enjoy the ride. S asked me how I remember all the rotten tomatoes scores, and I think it's because I no longer watch baseball. I've freed up a lot of room in my head that used to be filled with baseball statistics. For the next hour and a half or so I get to enjoy S and s having a nice sleep while some very buff man with long hair fires hammers into ice beings. I mean, it was a fantastic respite from what was to come. I was really only troubled by Thor's place in the human realm since it seemed that being the God of Thunder would make him damn near invincible in any upcoming Avengers movie and way more dangerous than Captain America and his crummy shield, but I suppose those meandering are for another day. It was a satisfying and sort of weird action movie.
The woman sitting in the aisle was somewhere in the 25-35 range. I didn't really get a good look at her but s sure did. When she wasn't crying, she would crawl across my lap and just stare at the woman, who was either a) sleeping b) and probably more likely putting on a fantastic display of fake sleeping to make us not feel so bad about our crazy crying baby.
Which is to say, s wound up crying for about 2 of the six hours we were en route. And not whimpering mind you, full on screaming. I'm just glad everyone gets headphones on an airplane. No one has the right to complain now. Just put in your damn head phones and jack up the music. The baby will go away. I spent the time awkwardly being passed s periodically while my wife attempted Ric Flair wrestling moves to try and get s attached to her chest. It was a rousing success. At one point we decided to get drinks and s promptly knocked them both on the ground and doused us both in Sprite. I'm not saying don't take your baby on a flight. I'm just saying don't take my baby on a flight.
The next few hours were random fits of sleep for me as s cried, and I felt guilty enough to not actually watch any more of the shows being aired, that and the shows being aired were terrible things like How I Met Your Mother. I don't give a shi- who says that show is good. It is only good because your standards for humor have been driven so low by the drivel that passes for comedy. I'd watch Doogie Hauser MD ten times a day before I'd watch that trite bs once. Rant complete. I've got to get back to watching the Big Bang Theory. You see....
It was kind of like a horror movie except the killer is roughly 29 inches tall and weights like 19 pounds and also doesn't kill people but just cries. I think we can get at least twenty million for this idea. We disembarked last. S claimed it was because it would take us time to get ready, but I think it was just to try and hide from our fellow passengers.
When we arrived at baggage my dad had our bag and said he'd asked several other passengers if they'd seen us in flight.
Person: Oh, that couple. With the baby?
Dad: Yeah.
Person: Oh yea. We saw them. We certainly all heard them.
He spared us the details but that's a pretty good guess. We then proceeded into the CA night, which was, well, CA, so awesome. Goodbye humidity. Hello random job hunting for the first two weeks back until I get sucked back in.
M: Look at the stars. (Remember it's roughly four A.M. or so now for the family)
M: (Waits) S are you looking at the stars? Look at how many of them there are?
M: S?
S: I see the stars. (sleepily).
M: Sighs romantically trying to evoke a little bit of John Keats.
We rolled in to my dad's house and hit the hay about 4 A.M. or roughly 7 A.M. our time. I can't remember the last time I had less fun staying up until 7 A.M. I mean, I guess we closed down the airport, which is kind of like closing down the bar for parents of small children.
We rousted ourselves out of bed at around 2 P.M. the next day because we're the type of folks who like to get an early start. The early bird gets the worm but the early bird only gets and effing worm, and I'll just keep sleeping thank you very much if that's my only reward. We had big plans to go the SF zoo, but my dad informed us that it closed in half an hour or something and that s would just have to go home without being eaten by a tiger. We broke the news to her carefully. She cried a bit, but I think it might have just been because she's a baby, and babies cry a lot. It's unclear.
The truth of the matter is that I'm a better person than S, note here, that a better person is someone who wakes up earlier. That means people in New Zealand are constantly kicking our ass and getting shi- done way ahead of schedule. Anyhow, I stumbled out of bed around noon and saw a wonderful hat on my dad's dresser that said Lake Tahoe on it. Naturally as that was the express location that our vacation was taking us I asked to borrow it. This thing was a dad hat to the core. Curdoroy or some shi- like that except easier to spell. His head is roughly nine times the size of mine, but I didn't bother resizing the damn thing because it was my vacation hat. I then stumbled outside in my Jesus is my Homeboy shirt with the red hat and some ripped jeans that I'd decided were my vacation pants to grab us some coffee because I'm a good person. Anyhow on the way over to the coffee shop some older gentleman rolled up on me in his car and asked me if I would like to join him on a trip to Saratoga after he finished filling up with gas.
Which means, he was either a) concerned that I was homeless. The hat and the jeans probably werent' helping. b) thinking that I was probably a really great conversationalist. c) A worker in the sex trade.
M: I think I'm just going to stick around here.
Guy: Okay.
Later:
M: I wonder how much I could have made.
S: With that hat? Not much.
The whole thing was really strange or a giant compliment. I mean, it's nice to know that I can just put on some new clothes and people assume that I'm homeless/great car company. Plus the real find was having this awesome vacation hat to wear for the rest of the weekend and doing things like getting annoyed at my mom and S and saying, "This is my vacation" and putting on my vacation hat and just sitting in the yard looking awesome or homeless or whatever.
We went out to Henry Cowell State Park and ambled around the redwoods instead. The redwoods were created by God and placed in CA to remind people that the east coast sucks. At least that's what my guidebook said. Anyhow, I basically just stared up at light filtering through trees and tried to gather everyone around for family pictures while my dad grifted guidebooks from unsuspecting grandparents who then had to listen in with their grandkids while I pedantically read descriptions of various trees. If you ever visit CA I'd suggest going to see them because they are truly awe inspiring. Also you should take me. I am considerably less awe inspiring but I can keep reminding you of how beautiful everything is until I drive you so far up the gd wall that you can climb up into the canopy of one of those beautiful redwoods I keep telling you about. Lil s loved the walk and basically just did this kind of odd screaming thing that she does and everyone thought was cute because she's a baby and babies get away with all sorts of crazy stuff like pooping themselves and singing when everyone is just trying to enjoy the majesty of the redwoods.
M: s. Do you notice that you are the only one making noise?
s: (silence)
M: I think this counts as defiance. Can I spank her?
s: Sings
S: No.
After hotfooting around the 1/2 mile track in roughly three and a half hours we grabbed some ice cream because we were so effing worn out from all the beauty. Except the albino tree and the particular type of redwood that they thought were extinct both of which turned out to be small and ridiculous looking in comparison to the real stuff, and if I wrote the guide I've have takne both of those stops out and just had something reminding people to look up and enjoy the majesty before I punched them in the face. I guess I've never really written a guide book before. Did I tell you about the weather?
We got home and had a nice home dinner prepared by my father. I think we tapped out at like nine or something. In the meantime I read a few stories from The Barnum Museum, which is yet another collection of stories by my main man Steven Millhauser who pretty much kicks ass. Anyhow, the real point of this day is how amazingly dry the weather is in CA and how they've got stars and redwoods we should all move there together and live in a commune until someone ruins it by falling in love.
Picture Time
Father and son looking good on the trail
I know what you're thinking and yes that is just one tree. One big gd amazing tree. Look on my works yet mighty and despair or whatever. Or you're thinking what an amazing looking family you're seeing. It's okay. That tree pales in comparison and that's why it got cut down.
Oh look, some light is coming through trees. Remember how Saint Patrick converted the Irish? Light through the trees. Read your how the Irish saved civilization.
Does this guy look like some easy cheap sex worker to you? Okay, but only a little bit.
Why yes, that is just one tree. One giant effing tree. Am I scared of that tree? No that's why I stood inside of it's heart with my family. Do trees have hearts?
I know what you're thinking now. You're thinking, I bet light is coming through those trees really nicely, and I'd like to see ten photos of it. Too bad. You only get one or two more. Buy your own camera
Some dude from oldin times actually lived in this tree. You can stand up inside the thing completely and stretch your arms out. It's kind of scary. I bet that guy didn't have this awesome hat though.
This is how I feel about trees. Go buy a gd hybrid and stop whining about your iphones and inability to have a tv in every room in your house. Hug a tree you pansy.
We asked my dad to watch s for a minute. They both looked kind of scared.
We saw this really pretty glen or dale or hollow or whatever and took like nine thousand pictures of it. None of which did it any justice, which is why photography is middle brow art. Just put the camera down and enjoy it. Or go take a picture of light coming through trees.
When I'm wearing my vacation hat I don't abide by rules in state parks. I climb up fifteen feet into trees to take pictures of other trees with light coming through them. I paid ten bucks and this hat don't take no prisoners.
Look at this tree and despair you lazy hipster. This tree got to twenty two and it didn't grow a mustache and start whining about some garage band it just saw last night.No. This tree grew two other effing trees out of it like a man. So put down your pabst and that other shit-- drink that is even more popular now that I don't even know because I'm out admiring trees and admire some trees.
This baby could give a crap about trees. She was more excited to chew on the straps of her stroller. She's a bad ass.
The woman sitting in the aisle was somewhere in the 25-35 range. I didn't really get a good look at her but s sure did. When she wasn't crying, she would crawl across my lap and just stare at the woman, who was either a) sleeping b) and probably more likely putting on a fantastic display of fake sleeping to make us not feel so bad about our crazy crying baby.
Which is to say, s wound up crying for about 2 of the six hours we were en route. And not whimpering mind you, full on screaming. I'm just glad everyone gets headphones on an airplane. No one has the right to complain now. Just put in your damn head phones and jack up the music. The baby will go away. I spent the time awkwardly being passed s periodically while my wife attempted Ric Flair wrestling moves to try and get s attached to her chest. It was a rousing success. At one point we decided to get drinks and s promptly knocked them both on the ground and doused us both in Sprite. I'm not saying don't take your baby on a flight. I'm just saying don't take my baby on a flight.
The next few hours were random fits of sleep for me as s cried, and I felt guilty enough to not actually watch any more of the shows being aired, that and the shows being aired were terrible things like How I Met Your Mother. I don't give a shi- who says that show is good. It is only good because your standards for humor have been driven so low by the drivel that passes for comedy. I'd watch Doogie Hauser MD ten times a day before I'd watch that trite bs once. Rant complete. I've got to get back to watching the Big Bang Theory. You see....
It was kind of like a horror movie except the killer is roughly 29 inches tall and weights like 19 pounds and also doesn't kill people but just cries. I think we can get at least twenty million for this idea. We disembarked last. S claimed it was because it would take us time to get ready, but I think it was just to try and hide from our fellow passengers.
When we arrived at baggage my dad had our bag and said he'd asked several other passengers if they'd seen us in flight.
Person: Oh, that couple. With the baby?
Dad: Yeah.
Person: Oh yea. We saw them. We certainly all heard them.
He spared us the details but that's a pretty good guess. We then proceeded into the CA night, which was, well, CA, so awesome. Goodbye humidity. Hello random job hunting for the first two weeks back until I get sucked back in.
M: Look at the stars. (Remember it's roughly four A.M. or so now for the family)
M: (Waits) S are you looking at the stars? Look at how many of them there are?
M: S?
S: I see the stars. (sleepily).
M: Sighs romantically trying to evoke a little bit of John Keats.
We rolled in to my dad's house and hit the hay about 4 A.M. or roughly 7 A.M. our time. I can't remember the last time I had less fun staying up until 7 A.M. I mean, I guess we closed down the airport, which is kind of like closing down the bar for parents of small children.
We rousted ourselves out of bed at around 2 P.M. the next day because we're the type of folks who like to get an early start. The early bird gets the worm but the early bird only gets and effing worm, and I'll just keep sleeping thank you very much if that's my only reward. We had big plans to go the SF zoo, but my dad informed us that it closed in half an hour or something and that s would just have to go home without being eaten by a tiger. We broke the news to her carefully. She cried a bit, but I think it might have just been because she's a baby, and babies cry a lot. It's unclear.
The truth of the matter is that I'm a better person than S, note here, that a better person is someone who wakes up earlier. That means people in New Zealand are constantly kicking our ass and getting shi- done way ahead of schedule. Anyhow, I stumbled out of bed around noon and saw a wonderful hat on my dad's dresser that said Lake Tahoe on it. Naturally as that was the express location that our vacation was taking us I asked to borrow it. This thing was a dad hat to the core. Curdoroy or some shi- like that except easier to spell. His head is roughly nine times the size of mine, but I didn't bother resizing the damn thing because it was my vacation hat. I then stumbled outside in my Jesus is my Homeboy shirt with the red hat and some ripped jeans that I'd decided were my vacation pants to grab us some coffee because I'm a good person. Anyhow on the way over to the coffee shop some older gentleman rolled up on me in his car and asked me if I would like to join him on a trip to Saratoga after he finished filling up with gas.
Which means, he was either a) concerned that I was homeless. The hat and the jeans probably werent' helping. b) thinking that I was probably a really great conversationalist. c) A worker in the sex trade.
M: I think I'm just going to stick around here.
Guy: Okay.
Later:
M: I wonder how much I could have made.
S: With that hat? Not much.
The whole thing was really strange or a giant compliment. I mean, it's nice to know that I can just put on some new clothes and people assume that I'm homeless/great car company. Plus the real find was having this awesome vacation hat to wear for the rest of the weekend and doing things like getting annoyed at my mom and S and saying, "This is my vacation" and putting on my vacation hat and just sitting in the yard looking awesome or homeless or whatever.
We went out to Henry Cowell State Park and ambled around the redwoods instead. The redwoods were created by God and placed in CA to remind people that the east coast sucks. At least that's what my guidebook said. Anyhow, I basically just stared up at light filtering through trees and tried to gather everyone around for family pictures while my dad grifted guidebooks from unsuspecting grandparents who then had to listen in with their grandkids while I pedantically read descriptions of various trees. If you ever visit CA I'd suggest going to see them because they are truly awe inspiring. Also you should take me. I am considerably less awe inspiring but I can keep reminding you of how beautiful everything is until I drive you so far up the gd wall that you can climb up into the canopy of one of those beautiful redwoods I keep telling you about. Lil s loved the walk and basically just did this kind of odd screaming thing that she does and everyone thought was cute because she's a baby and babies get away with all sorts of crazy stuff like pooping themselves and singing when everyone is just trying to enjoy the majesty of the redwoods.
M: s. Do you notice that you are the only one making noise?
s: (silence)
M: I think this counts as defiance. Can I spank her?
s: Sings
S: No.
After hotfooting around the 1/2 mile track in roughly three and a half hours we grabbed some ice cream because we were so effing worn out from all the beauty. Except the albino tree and the particular type of redwood that they thought were extinct both of which turned out to be small and ridiculous looking in comparison to the real stuff, and if I wrote the guide I've have takne both of those stops out and just had something reminding people to look up and enjoy the majesty before I punched them in the face. I guess I've never really written a guide book before. Did I tell you about the weather?
We got home and had a nice home dinner prepared by my father. I think we tapped out at like nine or something. In the meantime I read a few stories from The Barnum Museum, which is yet another collection of stories by my main man Steven Millhauser who pretty much kicks ass. Anyhow, the real point of this day is how amazingly dry the weather is in CA and how they've got stars and redwoods we should all move there together and live in a commune until someone ruins it by falling in love.
Picture Time
Father and son looking good on the trail
I know what you're thinking and yes that is just one tree. One big gd amazing tree. Look on my works yet mighty and despair or whatever. Or you're thinking what an amazing looking family you're seeing. It's okay. That tree pales in comparison and that's why it got cut down.
Oh look, some light is coming through trees. Remember how Saint Patrick converted the Irish? Light through the trees. Read your how the Irish saved civilization.
Does this guy look like some easy cheap sex worker to you? Okay, but only a little bit.
Why yes, that is just one tree. One giant effing tree. Am I scared of that tree? No that's why I stood inside of it's heart with my family. Do trees have hearts?
I know what you're thinking now. You're thinking, I bet light is coming through those trees really nicely, and I'd like to see ten photos of it. Too bad. You only get one or two more. Buy your own camera
Some dude from oldin times actually lived in this tree. You can stand up inside the thing completely and stretch your arms out. It's kind of scary. I bet that guy didn't have this awesome hat though.
This is how I feel about trees. Go buy a gd hybrid and stop whining about your iphones and inability to have a tv in every room in your house. Hug a tree you pansy.
We asked my dad to watch s for a minute. They both looked kind of scared.
We saw this really pretty glen or dale or hollow or whatever and took like nine thousand pictures of it. None of which did it any justice, which is why photography is middle brow art. Just put the camera down and enjoy it. Or go take a picture of light coming through trees.
When I'm wearing my vacation hat I don't abide by rules in state parks. I climb up fifteen feet into trees to take pictures of other trees with light coming through them. I paid ten bucks and this hat don't take no prisoners.
Look at this tree and despair you lazy hipster. This tree got to twenty two and it didn't grow a mustache and start whining about some garage band it just saw last night.No. This tree grew two other effing trees out of it like a man. So put down your pabst and that other shit-- drink that is even more popular now that I don't even know because I'm out admiring trees and admire some trees.
This baby could give a crap about trees. She was more excited to chew on the straps of her stroller. She's a bad ass.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Twelve Days of CA vacation
Vacation was invented so that working folk don't one day go into their bosses office and tell them how they feel about management styles. Sadly, plane flight was not invented to move people more expediently from place to place but to punish individuals for overpopulating the planet with their children.
The first day of vacation started like all great days of vacation start...at work, trying to put in some extra hours to cling to a few more vacation hours in the future that will allow you to make it one more week without going entirely nuts. I don't remember exactly I was doing at work on the first day of vacation, but I'm fairly certain that it was some amazing stuff. After that I rushed home to pack because I hadn't packed yet for the week, or maybe I had, it's hard to remember with s screaming and teething in the background. It's amazing how much of your mental energy is taken up by the screaming of a child.
Anyhoos, we dashed off to the airport by 4:30 or so, briefly sat in traffic due to an accident though we sort of assumed it was just awful and typical DC area traffic.
M: We're going to miss our flight.
S: We're not going to miss out flight.
M: I guess we can just walk to San Francisco
S: We're fine.
M: Maybe you are, but I'm worried that I'd pass out around Missouri.
S: Stop being dramatic.
M: You'd be dramatic too if you had to walk to San Francisco.
Eventually the traffic broke up, and we hurried into the wonderful long term parking provided by the friendly folks at the BWI airport. (It's like a howling, this noise. S is feeding her a bottle, but every time the shrimp stops drinking she starts going on as if she's a werewolf). As we walked quickly towards the bus S raised her hand and tried to stop the driver who drove on blissfully.
S: I guess having a baby doesn't help.
M: I guess not.
S: Why are bus drivers so mean?
M: I don't know. I think they get paid good money. Maybe it's that they get to rich that they're stuck up.
S: Unlikely.
By the time we had done the security thing, which involved me being centrifuged or whatever, followed by a light pat down. Don't worry, I tipped, we made our way to our flight, which we learned had been delayed by half an hour. Luckily it was already past s's bedtime. Unfortunately, all the glitz and glamour of the airport made it hard for her to sleep. I think it was like Hollywood for her or something with all the bright lights and people walking around. She mainly smacked the seats in front of her or squirmed around.
S tried to get her to nurse for a while, which turned into a full scale crying fit. (And she's now been going for roughly 2.5 hours. I'm proposing more Tylenol but have been refused by the attending).
M: Maybe we should take the aisle on the flight, so she can walk around.
S: I think privacy for feeding is best.
M: Really?
S: Yes.
This after doing the whole feeding thing in the waiting area with 300 other folks sitting around in postures of annoyance. We were then told that our flight was being delayed for 2.5 hours, and that we'd be leaving at 10:50 and arriving in San Francisco just in time to celebrate New Year's with Dick Clark. Lil s was well past her bed time and eventually she slept for a half an hour or so, only 11 hours short of her usual repast.
We take our seats and give the aisle to a woman who looks thirtyish, and who doesn't make any faces when she sees we have a baby. She should of. At take off S gives lil s her small blanket and pacifier and the little one drifts off to sleep. We can do this.
11:30 Just as we're settling in to the flight the little one wakes up, and S immediately engages her in some sort of obscure wrestling match designed to irritate her, though I was later told that she was trying to feed her. I think S took the fist couple of rounds, but lil s is a fighter and got in her fair share of kicks as well. Meanwhile, the passenger next to us is turning up the volume on her speakers and listening to some rap.
By midnight s had calmed down and started to sleep. S was sleeping as well the two of them curled up, just so, while we sailed on the backs of clouds through the deepening shadows of night. (We're now in the process of Ferberizing the child. Literally, right now. The crying has dipped to a low whimper. And, the beginning of the whimper lead me to let out a bit of a laugh. Apparently rampant crying is a bit stressful. Also, a feeling of guilt is creeping in that we're teaching our baby that we won't always be there to soothe and fix things for her, that she'll have to do it herself. It is a painful thing, being a parent. As if we haven't had enough tears now S is crying over s crying. I'm currently looking for something to gouge out my ears with Shakespearean tragedy style).
The first day of vacation started like all great days of vacation start...at work, trying to put in some extra hours to cling to a few more vacation hours in the future that will allow you to make it one more week without going entirely nuts. I don't remember exactly I was doing at work on the first day of vacation, but I'm fairly certain that it was some amazing stuff. After that I rushed home to pack because I hadn't packed yet for the week, or maybe I had, it's hard to remember with s screaming and teething in the background. It's amazing how much of your mental energy is taken up by the screaming of a child.
Anyhoos, we dashed off to the airport by 4:30 or so, briefly sat in traffic due to an accident though we sort of assumed it was just awful and typical DC area traffic.
M: We're going to miss our flight.
S: We're not going to miss out flight.
M: I guess we can just walk to San Francisco
S: We're fine.
M: Maybe you are, but I'm worried that I'd pass out around Missouri.
S: Stop being dramatic.
M: You'd be dramatic too if you had to walk to San Francisco.
Eventually the traffic broke up, and we hurried into the wonderful long term parking provided by the friendly folks at the BWI airport. (It's like a howling, this noise. S is feeding her a bottle, but every time the shrimp stops drinking she starts going on as if she's a werewolf). As we walked quickly towards the bus S raised her hand and tried to stop the driver who drove on blissfully.
S: I guess having a baby doesn't help.
M: I guess not.
S: Why are bus drivers so mean?
M: I don't know. I think they get paid good money. Maybe it's that they get to rich that they're stuck up.
S: Unlikely.
By the time we had done the security thing, which involved me being centrifuged or whatever, followed by a light pat down. Don't worry, I tipped, we made our way to our flight, which we learned had been delayed by half an hour. Luckily it was already past s's bedtime. Unfortunately, all the glitz and glamour of the airport made it hard for her to sleep. I think it was like Hollywood for her or something with all the bright lights and people walking around. She mainly smacked the seats in front of her or squirmed around.
S tried to get her to nurse for a while, which turned into a full scale crying fit. (And she's now been going for roughly 2.5 hours. I'm proposing more Tylenol but have been refused by the attending).
M: Maybe we should take the aisle on the flight, so she can walk around.
S: I think privacy for feeding is best.
M: Really?
S: Yes.
This after doing the whole feeding thing in the waiting area with 300 other folks sitting around in postures of annoyance. We were then told that our flight was being delayed for 2.5 hours, and that we'd be leaving at 10:50 and arriving in San Francisco just in time to celebrate New Year's with Dick Clark. Lil s was well past her bed time and eventually she slept for a half an hour or so, only 11 hours short of her usual repast.
We take our seats and give the aisle to a woman who looks thirtyish, and who doesn't make any faces when she sees we have a baby. She should of. At take off S gives lil s her small blanket and pacifier and the little one drifts off to sleep. We can do this.
11:30 Just as we're settling in to the flight the little one wakes up, and S immediately engages her in some sort of obscure wrestling match designed to irritate her, though I was later told that she was trying to feed her. I think S took the fist couple of rounds, but lil s is a fighter and got in her fair share of kicks as well. Meanwhile, the passenger next to us is turning up the volume on her speakers and listening to some rap.
By midnight s had calmed down and started to sleep. S was sleeping as well the two of them curled up, just so, while we sailed on the backs of clouds through the deepening shadows of night. (We're now in the process of Ferberizing the child. Literally, right now. The crying has dipped to a low whimper. And, the beginning of the whimper lead me to let out a bit of a laugh. Apparently rampant crying is a bit stressful. Also, a feeling of guilt is creeping in that we're teaching our baby that we won't always be there to soothe and fix things for her, that she'll have to do it herself. It is a painful thing, being a parent. As if we haven't had enough tears now S is crying over s crying. I'm currently looking for something to gouge out my ears with Shakespearean tragedy style).
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Day One
We arrive at the airport with enough time to buy overpriced food and slough our bags off onto the ground before taking turns finding the restroom. We do no resting. Lil s clambers around on the ground, but we're scared to let her crawl around because airports and big cities are dirty. She screams for a bit and an older couple smiles benignly at her.
Our flight is delayed by thirty minutes, and we're trying to keep her entertained with various straps that she pats lovingly before chewing. Wait, it's late. Let's just listen to music. This song kind of sounds like Falling Slowly from Once.
Our flight is delayed by thirty minutes, and we're trying to keep her entertained with various straps that she pats lovingly before chewing. Wait, it's late. Let's just listen to music. This song kind of sounds like Falling Slowly from Once.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Flying
The Onion gets us started
All Flights Grounded After FAA Officials Suddenly Realize That Man Was Not Meant To Fly
WASHINGTON—Shortly after 3 p.m. today, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the immediate grounding of all commercial and private aircraft, a result of top officials' collective realization that humankind was never meant to fly. "It is wrong—nay, foolish—for lowly man to aspire to the realm of birds and dare to soar across the firmament in unholy flight," said FAA administrator Randy Babbitt, announcing the indefinite cancellation of all 87,000 daily flights through U.S. airspace. "Alas, man's destiny lies not amongst the clouds. So let us be guided by hubristic folly no longer and embrace our terrestrial provenance." Addressing concerns from thousands of disaffected passengers, Babbitt also stated that man was not meant to be reunited with any luggage that had been bumped onto a later flight.
We're going out to California. The bright side is that we'll be in CA, which is loosely known as the place where God intended man to reside. The bad news is, and this is sort of surreal, that we'll be the people on the flight with the baby. It's somewhat hard to imagine. I mean, I'm fairly used to s at this point, but I'm not ready for an airport with a baby. Airports are stressful experiences all the way around, everyone is flustered and standing too close to one another and in a hurry or kind of in a hurry etc. etc. One or the other of us is generally irritable because airports are designed to make people irritable. One of us is always more in a hurry or more put together than the other. And now we're throwing a baby in the mix. Have mercy on the person who sits next to us.
Also, I'm convinced every time I fly that I'm probably going to die, so you can add that to the list of anxieties for this whole flight thing. Every time I manage to not die in flight I remind myself to never book another flight, and then I proceed to book a flight again. Ah, the folly of man. So, yeah, I'm just hoping that s sleeps the whole time and doesn't realize that man wasn't meant to fly, nor baby, and begins crying, as a result, like a wild banshee. I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it. Or maybe it's the fact that I had to wake up so gd early. That always clouds my thoughts. I have a tendency on these mornings that I wake early to stand still, like prey trying to avoid predator, while I decide whether to wear brown shoes or grey ones. And I will go back and forth on it in a way that I wouldn't if I was well-rested, and eventually I'll have to snap myself out of this stasis, just standing in our half-lit, sunken ship like room, worrying about my shoes, and remind myself that nobody gives a good gd what pair of shoes I wear except myself and that it's time to get out the door.
Do you think they'll let us put the pack and play together on the flight? Wouldn't it be better for all of us? I wonder if the in-flight movie is going to suck. Remember that time I almost started crying after Marley and Me. I mean, it's a movie with a dog, of course the gd thing is going to die. How did you not see it coming? Is it too much to ask that every person on the flight remain quiet and still while she sleeps? Can I ask the person next to me to hold her if S and I are both tired. "She's a good baby, just don't look at her nose or she'll bite you."
Or "Here, take her. We don't know her name yet. We're waiting for her to tell us."
Or "She's a good sleeper as long as you don't breathe. That bothers her."
Or "She's her mother's daughter, which is unfortunate because her mother's a bit of a crier."
Or "Look, it could be much worse, you could be sitting next to a werewolf. Would you like that buddy? I bet you would until it bit off your head. Now don't you feel lucky to at least have your head? Ungrateful bastar-."
Or "Don't worry, she usually only cries for the first three hours."
Or "Man, lucky you, getting stuck next to a baby. Remember that point when the pressure changes and your ears go all weird. Guess what? She can't talk, so she's going to just have to scream it out." Later: "That's right honey. Scream it out. Don't let the devil get in there."
Here.
All Flights Grounded After FAA Officials Suddenly Realize That Man Was Not Meant To Fly
WASHINGTON—Shortly after 3 p.m. today, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the immediate grounding of all commercial and private aircraft, a result of top officials' collective realization that humankind was never meant to fly. "It is wrong—nay, foolish—for lowly man to aspire to the realm of birds and dare to soar across the firmament in unholy flight," said FAA administrator Randy Babbitt, announcing the indefinite cancellation of all 87,000 daily flights through U.S. airspace. "Alas, man's destiny lies not amongst the clouds. So let us be guided by hubristic folly no longer and embrace our terrestrial provenance." Addressing concerns from thousands of disaffected passengers, Babbitt also stated that man was not meant to be reunited with any luggage that had been bumped onto a later flight.
We're going out to California. The bright side is that we'll be in CA, which is loosely known as the place where God intended man to reside. The bad news is, and this is sort of surreal, that we'll be the people on the flight with the baby. It's somewhat hard to imagine. I mean, I'm fairly used to s at this point, but I'm not ready for an airport with a baby. Airports are stressful experiences all the way around, everyone is flustered and standing too close to one another and in a hurry or kind of in a hurry etc. etc. One or the other of us is generally irritable because airports are designed to make people irritable. One of us is always more in a hurry or more put together than the other. And now we're throwing a baby in the mix. Have mercy on the person who sits next to us.
Also, I'm convinced every time I fly that I'm probably going to die, so you can add that to the list of anxieties for this whole flight thing. Every time I manage to not die in flight I remind myself to never book another flight, and then I proceed to book a flight again. Ah, the folly of man. So, yeah, I'm just hoping that s sleeps the whole time and doesn't realize that man wasn't meant to fly, nor baby, and begins crying, as a result, like a wild banshee. I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it. Or maybe it's the fact that I had to wake up so gd early. That always clouds my thoughts. I have a tendency on these mornings that I wake early to stand still, like prey trying to avoid predator, while I decide whether to wear brown shoes or grey ones. And I will go back and forth on it in a way that I wouldn't if I was well-rested, and eventually I'll have to snap myself out of this stasis, just standing in our half-lit, sunken ship like room, worrying about my shoes, and remind myself that nobody gives a good gd what pair of shoes I wear except myself and that it's time to get out the door.
Do you think they'll let us put the pack and play together on the flight? Wouldn't it be better for all of us? I wonder if the in-flight movie is going to suck. Remember that time I almost started crying after Marley and Me. I mean, it's a movie with a dog, of course the gd thing is going to die. How did you not see it coming? Is it too much to ask that every person on the flight remain quiet and still while she sleeps? Can I ask the person next to me to hold her if S and I are both tired. "She's a good baby, just don't look at her nose or she'll bite you."
Or "Here, take her. We don't know her name yet. We're waiting for her to tell us."
Or "She's a good sleeper as long as you don't breathe. That bothers her."
Or "She's her mother's daughter, which is unfortunate because her mother's a bit of a crier."
Or "Look, it could be much worse, you could be sitting next to a werewolf. Would you like that buddy? I bet you would until it bit off your head. Now don't you feel lucky to at least have your head? Ungrateful bastar-."
Or "Don't worry, she usually only cries for the first three hours."
Or "Man, lucky you, getting stuck next to a baby. Remember that point when the pressure changes and your ears go all weird. Guess what? She can't talk, so she's going to just have to scream it out." Later: "That's right honey. Scream it out. Don't let the devil get in there."
Here.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Here are some great things
The New Scientist had an article called the Grand Delusion in May that pretty much takes the wind out of everyone's sails. It's treading familiar territory, but they've done a nice job of making a nice concise point about the way we regard ourselves and reality. We're deluded.
This seems a bit relevant in light of our recent debt ceiling kerfluffle. Anyhow, pretty much everyone, myself included, sees the world through biases and self-serving hypocrisies. Basically, we develop an opinion on something like our President, and we assume that we have thought deeply about whether his polices are good or not and then we assume that someone who drew the opposite conclusion is wrong. This can show up at work or marriage, taking credit for success and denying responsibility for failure. Most people will claim to not be racist or sexist. Most people are even if just the smallest bit. I mean, look at the environmental issue. It's not even about opinion, it's about scientific fact, and yet, the argument goes on about climate change.
The great part about all this is that presenting people with new information that contradicts their beliefs actually, more often than not, tends to harden their position. So, yeah, not a lot of hope there. I essentially can't make a convincing case to someone who disagrees with me because I'll likely just push them over the edge.
Biased writer entry. I ran a book club for a while, and one of the things that I'm actually proud of is that on a couple of occasions my opinion about the book changed during the course of the discussion. Ie, compelling arguments or points changed my perception of it. That being said, I'd be loathe to change my view of the books that I love. People who don't like them are just foolish. Wink.
74 percent of drivers believe themselves to be above average. See the problem? Interestingly if you ask people to rate themselves on any positive trait, honesty, originality etc. most people say they are above average. (I feel bad for that one average jerk) Ask people about negative traits and they'll say they are below average. Also, most people believe themselves to be immune to this problem. Uh, yeah, problematic.
Anyhow, the long and the short of it is we surround ourselves with people who reinforce these probably sort of false perceptions of ourselves and create an us and them mentality. This has recently played out on the big screen in our government. It can't possibly be right that spending cuts should be coupled with revenue increase. Clearly one of the policies about the size of government is right and one is wrong. And you probably have a really firm idea about where you stand on the issue that's reinforced constantly by the people around you and your own biases. Myself included.
One interesting aside, according to a study you're more likely to know what your spouse is thinking in the first year than at any other point in time in your marriage. The study shows that people are actually better at communicating, picking up queues etc. with a stranger.
All in all, good stuff. Of course, we're all now kind of up shi- creek without a paddle. After you've finished reading this, him mom and dad, you'll pat yourself on the back for being an intelligent and discerning person unlike most of the population who suffers from all these biases and delusions. Sigh.
The other interesting point is that creating this illusion that you're way more informed and with it than the other guys is actually pretty intrinsic to your happiness. People who don't think of themselves as amazing tend to get depressed. Catch-22 good sir.
The real take away from all this should be that it's great that we're all so mentally healthy and right about everything all the time. Just ask us.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Okay, assessment time: Failure
Well, We've Answered This Question (Chess Master v. Pawn Dept)
By James Fallows (The well respected
Aug 1 2011, 11:15 AM ET
Last month in four installments -- one, two, three, and four -- I posted readers' views on how we should understand President Obama's negotiating stance during the (unnecessary and abusive) debt-ceiling "showdown." Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the opposition, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe? Or was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? Or pawn?
I think we know the answer, at least about this encounter. Pawn, and captured pawn at that.
The Republicans, with control of only one house of Congress, succeeded on virtually every point that mattered to them, especially to their most intransigent members. The Democrats, in control of the presidency and the other, "senior" house, succeeded on nothing that should have mattered to them, starting with implicitly legitimizing the conversion of the debt-ceiling vote into a hostage-taking exercise -- and ending with embracing a "compromise" that in the short term depresses hopes for dealing with our one genuine economic emergency, the unemployment crisis, and that in the long-run is likely to be as bad for our political system as for our economic prospects.
There will be time to parse all the details. And it's still a long time until the 2012 presidential election. It was four three months ago today that a triumphant-seeming President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden; it is 15 months until Election Day. The point is, a lot can change in politics very fast. For now, just two notes of commentary. From Greg Sargent at the Washington Post yesterday (emphasis in original):
>>Anything can happen, but it apppears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return.
Not only that, but Republicans -- in perhaps the most remarkable example of political up-is-downism in recent memory -- cast their willingness to dangle the threat of national crisis as a brave and heroic effort they'd undertaken on behalf of the national interest. Only the threat of national crisis could force the immediate spending cuts supposedly necessary to prevent a far more epic crisis later.<<
And from Tom Tomorrow last month, at Daily Kos. When I posted a link to this the first time, I said it was the "most biting" assessment of the Administration's negotiating stance. Now we see (as Joshua Green said at the time) that in fact it was the most prescient.
The President Surrenders
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 31, 2011
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A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
Related
Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Ross Douthat: The Diminished President (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
Editorial: To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal (August 1, 2011)
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For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
The Diminished President
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 31, 2011
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By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Ross Douthat
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Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders (August 1, 2011)
Editorial: To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
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Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding.
Start with the first round of deficit debates this winter. After the Republican sweep, the White House seemed to have two options: double down on Keynesian stimulus or pivot to the center and champion deficit reduction. Instead, Obama chose to hover above the fray, passing on his own fiscal commission’s recommendations and letting the Republicans make the first move.
The strategy worked, in a sense. Goaded by the president’s evasiveness, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans put forward a detailed long-term budget proposal of their own, whose Medicare cuts proved predictably unpopular. But while the subsequent policy debate favored Obama, the optics of the confrontation diminished him. The chairman of the House Budget Committee looked more like a leader than the president of the United States.
Then came the spring’s great foreign policy dilemma, the civil war in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. The president (wisely) didn’t want to put America’s blood and treasure on the line for the rebels, but he also didn’t want to take responsibility for letting Qaddafi crush the revolt. So the White House opted for a kind of quasi war, throwing just enough military power at the problem to ensure a stalemate and then punting responsibility to our NATO allies. An Obama adviser told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that the president was pioneering a new American way of statecraft: “Leading from behind.”
Again, the strategy worked, sort of. An immediate humanitarian crisis was averted, and Libya quickly fell out of the headlines. But it left Americans to contemplate a peculiar and unpresidential spectacle: The leader of the free world taking the country to war while pretending that he wasn’t, and then effectively washing his hands of the ultimate outcome — which, 135 days and counting later, is still very much in doubt.
The same pattern has played out in the debt ceiling debate. Instead of drawing clear lines and putting forward detailed proposals, the president has played Mr. Compromise — ceding ground to Republicans here, sermonizing about Tea Party intransigence and Washington gridlock there, and fleshing out his preferred approach reluctantly, if at all.
The White House no doubt figured that this negotiating strategy would either lead to a bipartisan grand bargain or else expose Republican extremism — or better still, do both. And again, the strategy is arguably working. Americans were given a glimpse of right-wing populism’s reckless side last week, and the final deal will probably let the president burnish his centrist credentials just in time for 2012.
But winning a debate on points isn’t a substitute for looking like a leader. It’s one thing to bemoan politics-as-usual when you’re running for the White House. It’s quite another to publicly throw up your hands over our “dysfunctional government” when you’re the man the voters put in charge of it.
In fairness, the president’s passive-aggressive approach is a bipartisan affliction. The ostensible front-runner for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, took a deliberately hazy position on last week’s crucial House debate, preferring to flunk a test of leadership rather than risk alienating either side. (The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney quipped that “if you took Obama’s plan and Romney’s plan, and just met in the middle, you’d be in the middle of nowhere.”)
This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.
There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.
Related
Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Ross Douthat: The Diminished President (August 1, 2011)
Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
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It is not yet set in stone, and there may still be time to make it better. But in the end, most Democrats will have no choice but to swallow their fury, accept the deal and, we hope, fight harder the next time.
For weeks, ever since House Republicans said they would not raise the nation’s debt ceiling without huge spending cuts, Democrats have held out for a few basic principles. There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden and Medicare cannot be affected.
Those principles were discarded to get a deal that cuts about $2.5 trillion from the deficit over a decade. The first $900 billion to a trillion will come directly from domestic discretionary programs (about a third of it from the Pentagon) and will include no new revenues. The next $1.5 trillion will be determined by a “supercommittee” of 12 lawmakers that could recommend revenues, but is unlikely to do so since half its members will be Republicans.
If the committee is deadlocked, or its recommendations are rejected by either house of Congress, then a dreaded guillotine of cuts would come down: $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending reductions that would begin to go into effect by early 2013.
Negotiators have tried to make this penalty mechanism as unpalatable as possible to provide an incentive for the supercommittee and Congress to avert it. For Democrats, the penalty would include cuts to Medicare providers. The penalty for Republicans should have been new tax revenues, but of course they refused to consider that and got their way. Instead, their incentive will be trying to avoid large cuts in the military budget.
Democrats won a provision drawn from automatic-cut mechanisms in previous decades that exempts low-income entitlement programs. There is no requirement that a balanced-budget amendment pass Congress. There will be no second hostage-taking on the debt ceiling in a few months, as Speaker John Boehner and his band of radicals originally demanded. Democratic negotiators decided that the automatic cut system, as bad as it is, was less of a threat to the economy than another default crisis, and many are counting on future Congresses to undo its arbitrary butchering.
Sadly, in a political environment laced with lunacy, that calculation is probably correct. Some Republicans in the House were inviting a default, hoping that an economic earthquake would shake Washington and the Obama administration beyond recognition. Democrats were right to fear the effects of a default and the impact of a new recession on all Americans.
President Obama could have been more adamant in dealing with Republicans, perhaps threatening to use constitutional powers to ignore the debt ceiling if Congress abrogated its responsibility to raise it. But this episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest.
Democrats can look forward to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts next year, and will have to make the case in the 2012 elections for new lawmakers who will undo the damage.
By James Fallows (The well respected
Aug 1 2011, 11:15 AM ET
Last month in four installments -- one, two, three, and four -- I posted readers' views on how we should understand President Obama's negotiating stance during the (unnecessary and abusive) debt-ceiling "showdown." Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the opposition, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe? Or was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? Or pawn?
I think we know the answer, at least about this encounter. Pawn, and captured pawn at that.
The Republicans, with control of only one house of Congress, succeeded on virtually every point that mattered to them, especially to their most intransigent members. The Democrats, in control of the presidency and the other, "senior" house, succeeded on nothing that should have mattered to them, starting with implicitly legitimizing the conversion of the debt-ceiling vote into a hostage-taking exercise -- and ending with embracing a "compromise" that in the short term depresses hopes for dealing with our one genuine economic emergency, the unemployment crisis, and that in the long-run is likely to be as bad for our political system as for our economic prospects.
There will be time to parse all the details. And it's still a long time until the 2012 presidential election. It was four three months ago today that a triumphant-seeming President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden; it is 15 months until Election Day. The point is, a lot can change in politics very fast. For now, just two notes of commentary. From Greg Sargent at the Washington Post yesterday (emphasis in original):
>>Anything can happen, but it apppears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return.
Not only that, but Republicans -- in perhaps the most remarkable example of political up-is-downism in recent memory -- cast their willingness to dangle the threat of national crisis as a brave and heroic effort they'd undertaken on behalf of the national interest. Only the threat of national crisis could force the immediate spending cuts supposedly necessary to prevent a far more epic crisis later.<<
And from Tom Tomorrow last month, at Daily Kos. When I posted a link to this the first time, I said it was the "most biting" assessment of the Administration's negotiating stance. Now we see (as Joshua Green said at the time) that in fact it was the most prescient.
The President Surrenders
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 31, 2011
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A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
Related
Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Ross Douthat: The Diminished President (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
Editorial: To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal (August 1, 2011)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (975) »
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
The Diminished President
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 31, 2011
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REPRINTS
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By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Ross Douthat
Go to Columnist Page »
Ross Douthat’s Evaluations
The columnist’s blog on politics and culture.
More From Evaluations »
Related
Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders (August 1, 2011)
Editorial: To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
Readers’ Comments
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Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding.
Start with the first round of deficit debates this winter. After the Republican sweep, the White House seemed to have two options: double down on Keynesian stimulus or pivot to the center and champion deficit reduction. Instead, Obama chose to hover above the fray, passing on his own fiscal commission’s recommendations and letting the Republicans make the first move.
The strategy worked, in a sense. Goaded by the president’s evasiveness, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans put forward a detailed long-term budget proposal of their own, whose Medicare cuts proved predictably unpopular. But while the subsequent policy debate favored Obama, the optics of the confrontation diminished him. The chairman of the House Budget Committee looked more like a leader than the president of the United States.
Then came the spring’s great foreign policy dilemma, the civil war in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. The president (wisely) didn’t want to put America’s blood and treasure on the line for the rebels, but he also didn’t want to take responsibility for letting Qaddafi crush the revolt. So the White House opted for a kind of quasi war, throwing just enough military power at the problem to ensure a stalemate and then punting responsibility to our NATO allies. An Obama adviser told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that the president was pioneering a new American way of statecraft: “Leading from behind.”
Again, the strategy worked, sort of. An immediate humanitarian crisis was averted, and Libya quickly fell out of the headlines. But it left Americans to contemplate a peculiar and unpresidential spectacle: The leader of the free world taking the country to war while pretending that he wasn’t, and then effectively washing his hands of the ultimate outcome — which, 135 days and counting later, is still very much in doubt.
The same pattern has played out in the debt ceiling debate. Instead of drawing clear lines and putting forward detailed proposals, the president has played Mr. Compromise — ceding ground to Republicans here, sermonizing about Tea Party intransigence and Washington gridlock there, and fleshing out his preferred approach reluctantly, if at all.
The White House no doubt figured that this negotiating strategy would either lead to a bipartisan grand bargain or else expose Republican extremism — or better still, do both. And again, the strategy is arguably working. Americans were given a glimpse of right-wing populism’s reckless side last week, and the final deal will probably let the president burnish his centrist credentials just in time for 2012.
But winning a debate on points isn’t a substitute for looking like a leader. It’s one thing to bemoan politics-as-usual when you’re running for the White House. It’s quite another to publicly throw up your hands over our “dysfunctional government” when you’re the man the voters put in charge of it.
In fairness, the president’s passive-aggressive approach is a bipartisan affliction. The ostensible front-runner for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, took a deliberately hazy position on last week’s crucial House debate, preferring to flunk a test of leadership rather than risk alienating either side. (The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney quipped that “if you took Obama’s plan and Romney’s plan, and just met in the middle, you’d be in the middle of nowhere.”)
This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.
There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.
Related
Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal (August 1, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Ross Douthat: The Diminished President (August 1, 2011)
Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders (August 1, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributors: Our Unbalanced Democracy (August 1, 2011)
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It is not yet set in stone, and there may still be time to make it better. But in the end, most Democrats will have no choice but to swallow their fury, accept the deal and, we hope, fight harder the next time.
For weeks, ever since House Republicans said they would not raise the nation’s debt ceiling without huge spending cuts, Democrats have held out for a few basic principles. There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden and Medicare cannot be affected.
Those principles were discarded to get a deal that cuts about $2.5 trillion from the deficit over a decade. The first $900 billion to a trillion will come directly from domestic discretionary programs (about a third of it from the Pentagon) and will include no new revenues. The next $1.5 trillion will be determined by a “supercommittee” of 12 lawmakers that could recommend revenues, but is unlikely to do so since half its members will be Republicans.
If the committee is deadlocked, or its recommendations are rejected by either house of Congress, then a dreaded guillotine of cuts would come down: $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending reductions that would begin to go into effect by early 2013.
Negotiators have tried to make this penalty mechanism as unpalatable as possible to provide an incentive for the supercommittee and Congress to avert it. For Democrats, the penalty would include cuts to Medicare providers. The penalty for Republicans should have been new tax revenues, but of course they refused to consider that and got their way. Instead, their incentive will be trying to avoid large cuts in the military budget.
Democrats won a provision drawn from automatic-cut mechanisms in previous decades that exempts low-income entitlement programs. There is no requirement that a balanced-budget amendment pass Congress. There will be no second hostage-taking on the debt ceiling in a few months, as Speaker John Boehner and his band of radicals originally demanded. Democratic negotiators decided that the automatic cut system, as bad as it is, was less of a threat to the economy than another default crisis, and many are counting on future Congresses to undo its arbitrary butchering.
Sadly, in a political environment laced with lunacy, that calculation is probably correct. Some Republicans in the House were inviting a default, hoping that an economic earthquake would shake Washington and the Obama administration beyond recognition. Democrats were right to fear the effects of a default and the impact of a new recession on all Americans.
President Obama could have been more adamant in dealing with Republicans, perhaps threatening to use constitutional powers to ignore the debt ceiling if Congress abrogated its responsibility to raise it. But this episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest.
Democrats can look forward to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts next year, and will have to make the case in the 2012 elections for new lawmakers who will undo the damage.
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