Saturday with Sadie

One of my parenting foibles has to do with wipes. For the record, it’s not that I don’t use them properly. As any parent knows, improper use of wipes just results in a diaper rash, which requires more attention, petroleum jelly, and rectums than any sane person is going to want to deal with. No, my problem with the wipes has something to with infinity. I blame both science and religion.

Most religions have an idea of what comes after we kick off from this world and into the next. A number of them involve an infinite time span filled with various types of bliss, virgins, harps, planets, alien overlords etc. In each case human beings, me specifically, are forced to consider an infinite amount of time strumming a harp, having coitus, or playing a game of chess with alien overlords. In each case the problem is not the action itself, most people understand how to play a harp, where babies come from, and how many planets you get to rule in the afterlife. However, the problematic thought experiment is the infinite: time without ceasing. (I’ve got an aside here that would go in a footnote if blogger allowed it. As a child my half-sister misinterpreted lyrics to a P.M. Dawn song “Die Without You” as “Time without shoes,” which, as eternities goes doesn’t seem to be that bad, but one would have to consider the length of time that it would take for your feet to toughen up, and whether we’d be walking about on cushy clouds or rocky half-formed planets full of Vulcans to determine whether it would all that bad. This is just a long way of saying, it’s hard to imagine the infinite).

Science has also recently piled on to infinity, claiming that we’re probably just one tiny blip of a universe in an incredibly expansive, dare I say infinite, multiplicity of universes. It’s apparently the only way that string theory can really hang together. In either case, I am forced to consider that there might be an infinite number of universes, and infinite number of me’s, having the same relatively quite Saturday afternoons, which, as an aside, I sort of hope not. I hope other me’s got into heavy duty cartography or film development or something. It would be a shame if we all worked in libraries throughout the universe. Anyhow, either way, here I am again, presented with the infinite, not as a conception, but actualized.

I promise this eventually, now in fact, ties back into parenting. During one of our minor rows in the course of raising lil s, S claimed, through tears, that the wastebasket in lil s’s room gets so full. This moment was followed by old-fashioned sobbing, so I can’t quite finish the quote. However, her point was, the wastebasket in lil s’s room occasionally needs to be emptied. And yet, in the few days that S has been gone I’ve noticed something about the wastebasket: its capacity for baby wipes is infinite. No matter how many wipes I add to the top I can always add two more without changing its overall composition. I believe some people would credit it to the fact that eventually my wife will empty it, or perhaps that the wipes lose mass as the moisture in them dissolves, thus making it seem as though no room has been lost after a period of three hours or so elapses, but I consider it a mystery of the universe—a bona fide miracle on the scale of the Babylonian hanging gardens; when filled with baby wipes, trash cans have infinite space.