Fatherhood, Thoughts On

Thoughts on being a new parent, part one of a series:
-- Shock: There's this odd realization that occurs after a few days of being at home and feeding and cleaning the boy, and that realization is that there's no one coming to pick this kid up; he has no other parents that have left him with you for the evening/weekend/week while they're on vacation or date night. You're it. Forever. Whoa.
-- Attack of the Innocents: He's crying. He's crying, and you've tried everything you can think of: cuddling, diaper, food, burping. He's about to break you down faster than Barney the Dinosaur played at ear-splitting decibels. And then, suddenly, he stops. He stops, and the fight just drains right out of him, and he gets this look on his face, often with his eyes closed, and that face is the most beatific face in the world: he's at peace, and so are you. And you melt.
-- Noise Canceling: Ever watched a kid melt down in a supermarket or other public place and wondered how the parents can handle all of that incredible screaming? Wonder no more: we get used to it. I can still be brought out of a dead sleep by a slight whimper two rooms away, but the shrieks and cries that accompany diaper changing? Well, I'm not a fan, but my pulse doesn't go up. He's got two modes of communication: on and off. Once he's communicated his discomfort to me, it's all just network noise: SYN? ACK. SYN? SYN? SYN? ACK. And if you didn't enjoy the old sound of a modem hooking up, I apologize in advance for the discomfort this may bring you.
-- Diapers! My good friends Alan and Kim (and their delightful boy Beckett) stopped by a couple of weekends before the C-section, and Alan told me that when he was in hospital for Kim's C-section he'd changed Beckett's diapers from the start, not really understanding that the nurses were quite willing to do it for him. Well, I'm as much of a masochist as the next guy, so when Luke was born, I stepped up and changed that first diaper. And I am here to tell you: it looked like fudgy tar, and it stuck like fudgy tar. But! Once that first diaper was done, the next one was better and easier, and it just kept progressing from there, until I was getting pretty darn relaxed about the whole thing. And then, last week, after I'd forced Yoko to go to bed for some much, much needed sleep, I got to experience a full blow-out. Luke's been eating formula and breast milk, so there's the occasional transition from one to the other, followed by predictable results downstairs. Let's just put it this way: it was a thing. Nuff said. However, as funky as those things get, thank god for olfactory desensitization; I _know_ this stuff is like toxic waste, but the most I get is a whiff of funk.
-- Process of Elimination: (Not directly related to the above.) Note to self: when the kid wakes up, starts acting uncomfortable, sorta cries, and starts rooting around for a breast or bottle or pacifier (DON'T JUDGE ME), do not be fooled or distracted; you are looking at a wet diaper. If you allow yourself, you can quickly find ourself running down the rabbit hole of trying to comfort, trying to feed, trying to burp, etc. You can spend half an hour walking the kid around, patting him on the back, singing to him, laying him down on his tummy to play, etc., and he'll be sorta satisfied with all of this attention, but, at the end of the day, that wet diaper is going to bring you right back to crying. Save time: check the diaper. Oh, and by "check the diaper" I mean open it up and feel the front of it; those little yellow stripes that are supposed to turn blue if the diaper is wet only work most of the time, but your finger will know the difference.
-- The Help: Yoko's mom is here from Japan, helping out. This is its own flavor of awesome. When I finish my midnight shift, I can hand over things to her and know that Yoko won't be on her own for the four or five hours I'm crashed out. And, of course, it's been great for my Japanese. New vocabulary: おむつ (omutsu, diaper); おしゃぶり (oshaburi, pacifier); こなミルク (konamiruku, formula); 母乳 (bonyuu, mother's milk); 泣く (naku, to cry or howl). Good times.

In Passing: Kim Jong Il

I was living in Japan when Kim Il Song died and passed the reins of power to Kim Jong Il. I remember being worried, at the time, that the DPRK might become unhinged, that KJI might launch conventional missiles at Japan just to demonstrate his power and resolve. My father, who was working in the military at the time, helped to allay my fears. KJI, he said, is reportedly more interested in wine, women, and song than in any expansion or conflict.

Dad was right. KJI was, at heart, a petty dictator riding on the rails set up by his much more conflict-oriented father. Over time, KJI became the keystone in a power struggle between the warring factions in the DPRK's military. The colonels and generals would plot against each other, but none of them would risk opposing The Great Leader Jr. for fear of being purged.

And purge he did, on occasion. Indications are that his own closest relatives have tried, over the years, to distance themselves from him. His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, tried to get into Japan on a forged Dominican Republic passport; the DPRK's story is that he was trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

And now, Kim Jong Eun; the youngest, at 27, of the sons, and now The Great Leader III. While this cannot have been a complete surprise to the military leadership, it also presumably won't be welcome news all around. With winter really just beginning to bear down, and with a lot of the world's dictators gone in the past year or so, the cracks may just be showing. As disrespectful as it may seem, this could very well be the season for diplomatic overtures. If the son can be assured safe passage off the tiger, well, we just might be able to see the end of this misbegotten dynasty before the decade's out.

What a Merry Xmas present that would make.

Three Years Ago Today

The weather is so much more appropriate today.

POTC: OST (No Spoilers)

Do you know, it's a bit off-putting when a sequence of films has enough entries to qualify for its own acronyms. It starts to feel as though perhaps the enterprise would be best served as a serial on TV: weekly episodes of Cap'n Jack Sparrow and Crüe seeking this or that odd treasure from piratical lore. Mind you, that way Hanna Barbera lies, and madness.

There's something about the POTC franchise, however, that wouldn't translate to the smaller* screen, and that something is almost certainly the pay-and/or-royalty check that Johnny Depp would have to get for his usual fun, rambling, charming, and roguish rapscallion performance. Say what you will about the romance between yon Orlando and Keira (and believe me, it's been said), but the real draw of the franchise is watching Depp inhabit the role of inebriated Keith RichardsCap'n Jack. And, in OST, inhabit it he does.

The movie's a ripper, a load of fun, and a decent ride. Like the original ride, it doesn't bear too much close inspection, mind, and, while it stands on its own, being somewhat familiar with the first three of the series will enrich the experience. We saw it sans 3D and were almost certainly better off for it; I can't think of anything in the film that needed (or would have benefitted) from a third visual dimension... though the plot/characters/etc. could have used more depth.

If you like the movie but wish there was more to the story, you might want to check out the book On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, listed in the end credits as the book the idea of the movie was "Suggested from." The similarities are really quite few (Fountain of Youth, Blackbeard, incidental magic), but Powers creates a fascinating world with rather well-thought-out rules for everyday magic (loads of Sympathy; a smattering of the Law of Contagion; plenty of negotiations with odd powers), and his research on pirates and how they lived is spot-on. Powers is also one of my favorite authors, so there's that, too.

* Not that much smaller, mind, given the distance from the couch; crikey, you could almost count the pores on Keith Richards' face if you brought this to some home screens these days.

AT&T: Free Calls to Japan

AT&T Offers Wireless, Wireline Billing Relief for Consumers Calling and Texting Family, Friends in Japan

And with that, AT&T is forgiven some of those &@#! dropped calls.

Japan: Earthquake, Tsunami; but the family's all right

Quick post to let folks know that Yoko's family seems to be all right. They're all in the south of Japan, so they haven't been directly affected by this disaster.

Our hearts go with the people of the Tohoku region where the tsunami hit.

UPDATE: Live Japanese news (in Japanese) here:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv

The chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp is the alarm that another quake has hit; a ringing bell means it's over M6.

TV Shows to Watch

If you have access to Cooking Channel and you're not watching Nadia G's Bitchin' Kitchen, you're not WINNING.

Just sayin'.

Addendum: For example:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is primarily a schoolgirl's diary with a bit of the unusual thrown in. Ishiguro seems to be obsessed with the propriety of British public school life and the repressed attitudes it engenders, so there's a palpable atmosphere of impotence mixed in with fear of societal opprobrium; even if one wanted to stand up for oneself, well, it wouldn't do, don't you see? It's simply not done. One doesn't tell off one's supposed friends; at best, one traps one's frenemies in awkward social circumstances where one can heap castigation without fear of reprisal.

It's like playing Spades with barbs and jests and feints instead of cards.

The thing is, Ishiguro is very good at writing in this fashion, and the story flows past like a powerful stream, not unpleasant at all in its flow, but inexorably pulling toward an unpleasant end. Kathy, his narrator, tells the story in a series of gushing remembrances, almost as though confiding to a carer of her own; her restrained passion for her story, and her need to confess it to the reader, are infectious, even as the story becomes more sinister and creepy.

In the end, however, propriety and its ability to rob one of all outrage win out, leaving this reader to wonder many things, not least of all, can the horrible complacency be undone?

Tron, Legacy, Etc. (No Spoilers)

Before the movie, the theater showed one of those Dolby Digital Cinema ads:



This may, in retrospect, have set the bar for computer graphics a wee bit high; the way that fire burns along numbers 7, 6, and 5 is just amazing stuff.

So, when we get to see fireworks in the Grid, I somehow, you know, had expectations. Instead: 80's style laser-light geometric shapes.

Ah. Oh. Ew.

Capsule review: fun, a little sloggy toward the middle, beautiful to look at in many places, but all-in-all very Disney, and not a whole lot there.

This Takes Some Parsing

According to the Boston Herald:

"Headline: Luggage that left from Logan explodes in Fla."

First off, bravo to the Boston Herald: their incredibly misleading and sensationalist headline got them the top spot on Google News, which is where I spotted it.

Next, a big raspberry to the Boston Herald: their headline makes it sound like a terrorist cell's bomb went off on a plane in Florida; their article makes it clear this is not the case... but then skimps on the details.

The first line of the story gets even more confusing:

"A man attempting to fly a bag filled with hundreds of bullet primers from Boston to Jamaica was thwarted when a baggage handler slammed his luggage on the tarmac in Miami and detonated the minuscule explosive wafers, the FBI said."

The first part sounds like a bad urban legend or a Darwin Award entry: did you hear the one about the guy who tried to fly on a bag filled with hundreds of bullet primers? He was thwarted (thwarted? Really? That's the word you want to go with here? What, did he twirl his mustachios and cry, "Drat!"?) when a baggage handler "slammed his luggage on the tarmac."

Yeah, you read that right. That guy who broke the suitcase you were assured was gorilla-proof? He's just been made a national hero for slamming that bag. Way to scare anyone out of ever checking their luggage again, Boston Herald.

But just in case you thought anyone might have been hurt, turns out they were miniscule explosive wafers.

Like, you know, mini cayenne-flavored Nilla Wafers.

Pop, pop.

You know what else goes pop? Boston Herald journalism, when you poke it with some facts.