faulty vision

I’ve been meaning to post pictures of this for a while, but for one reason or another I never got around to it. A while back, my friend Angela asked what she could make for Hobbes.

“We like Totoro,” I told her.

“I never got into that,” she said. “Some things I get, but that one, I never did.”

“The catbus is a little weird,” I allowed.

“You don’t think it’ll give your baby nightmares?”

“He’ll be at least half Japanese.”

“Hm,” she said, and signed off.

The result, when we visited Seattle in April, was this:

My Little Neighbor Totoro

“Holy crap,” I said, when I saw it.

“Do you think he’ll fit?” she asked.

“He’d better.”

And true, it is now the beginning of July, and Hobbes is now 9 months old, but you know what? He still does. And he’s still freaking adorable in it. If I do say so myself. Then again, it’s freaking adorable, so that all balances out. Notice the little ears on the hood?

“That’s incredible. I bet she could sell these for really good money,” Sako said this afternoon when she saw him in it.

So do I.

Thanks, Angela!

The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.

Brain’s response muted when we see other races in pain, New Scientist

It wasn’t much of a path up from the beach this past weekend. As you could see from the pictures, it was a pretty rocky area; there was sand (just enough to push Hobbes’s crank button) but that was a fairly limited portion of the area. The rest of it was all crags and slopes and pebbles. Needless to say, we were careful going up it: I because I’m a klutz; the Guy because he was hauling an incredibly chirpy Hobbes on his back.

About halfway up the slope, we met a group of very excited Caucasian children heading down. They were running, which was stupid, but they were boys, so … see point 1. The inevitable happened. One of them fell, grabbed his knee, inspected it — he was wearing shorts — and started to wail.

His brother and sister (I presume they were related) came back to regard him with disgust. “Don’t be such a baby,” they said. I would estimate they were all between 7 and 11 years old.

I’m not particularly surprised by New Scientist’s article; in fact, I’m only astonished that they had to do an actual study, but only in that cynical, “you needed to spend money to figure that out?” way.

The Guy never paused. In fact, I think he was already past the kids when the boy fell, so he didn’t even know anything had happened.

Me, I hesitated. I wavered. There was no obvious blood, and the boy’s siblings didn’t seem to be all that impressed by his injury. On the other hand….

Such automatic neural responses don’t necessarily translate into behaviour, cautions Farah. “Just because there is this difference in ACC response it doesn’t mean that we are inevitably going to behave less empathically toward the other group.”

“Is he okay?” I finally asked.

The boy’s brother and sister looked up. “He’s fine,” the brother said, with obvious disgust for his younger brother’s dramatics.

And then paternal wrath came stalking down the path towards them — “I told you boys not to run!” — so I nodded good-bye to them and left them to reap the consequences.

For the record, I am not more or less empathic based on the injured person’s race. Based on the injured person’s age, though; that’s another story altogether.

We’d just started down 280S, a beautiful, 10 lane freeway that runs through some of the more attractive woodlands and pasturelands in the Bay Area, when the Guy suddenly swore.

“Holy shit!”

I had just enough time to see something black and shiny fly cartwheeling across the lanes, and then we were swerving onto the side of the road. A split second later, I saw what the Guy had seen; a silver convertible sports car was hurtling up the large hill on the left side of the freeway, out of control. It crashed. There was no other word for it, really. It crashed into the hill, right front wheel first, and only pure, insane, ungodly luck kept it from flipping completely over and onto its top. Its uncovered top.

I fumbled for the phone and called 911 while the Guy got out of the car. Hobbes, sound asleep in his car seat, missed all the excitement. I got a busy signal; a car in front of us had also pulled over, and the driver had his phone out as well. Hopefully he had more luck. When I leaned out the window to investigate, I found that yet another car on the other side of the road had pulled over, and its driver was helping the crash victim out of the car. Incredibly, the man was able to stand, though his face was covered with blood.

“Idiot,” the Guy reported, when he got back into the car. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s too dangerous to cross the road, and he has help.”

“Busy signal,” I reported bitterly, and smacked the back of my phone. Because of course, that always works when you’re trying to get through to emergency services. “What happened?”

“He was driving too fast and lost control.” The Guy pulled us back into traffic. “He tried to change lanes but he was tailgating and he would’ve hit the car in front of him, so he tried to jerk back into his own lane and lost it. He’s driving too much car for him.”

“Was,” I corrected. There wasn’t much of the car left, from what I could see.

“Not anymore,” the Guy said. “Idiot.”

He has a deep contempt for bad drivers, of any stripe. We have had arguments about this before. I am not, shall we say, one of the talented few.

I don’t know why it should have come as a shock to discover that Hobbes is a morning person, but somehow it did. I was rather hoping that this was one of those baby things that he’d get over in time, like peeing on his parents while his diaper’s being changed, or trying to eat his fist, or going cross-eyed when people approach him from behind. Unfortunately, while he’s gotten over at least one of the above (guess which!) I’m afraid that rising with the sun is not one of them. I don’t know why I should be surprised; his father is just as bad, a fact which I have told him repeatedly would have been a dealbreaker if I’d known that about him when he proposed.

In his own defense, the Guy is prone to remind me that he didn’t become a morning person until after we got married. I’m not entirely sure how to take this, to be frank.

“So now that you’ve got me, you don’t want to stay in bed with me?”

He usually changes the subject.

At any rate, Hobbes’s preference for mornings is why we were on the road at an exhaustingly early hour of the morning in order to go to Half Moon Bay this morning.

Of all the changes that having a child has inflicted on us, going out is one of the most unexpected. I hadn’t realized (though of course I should have) how much immobility had contributed to Hobbes’s mellow personality; if one doesn’t have the ability to run around, much less roll over, of course one is perfectly content to simply lie around and try to suck on one’s fingers. As it happens, over the past few weeks, a peculiar but nonetheless speedy three-point crawl has entered Hobbes’s repertoire. Lately, he has taken to following us around the house — including those areas that are not actually childproofed yet — with the end result that he manages to run us ragged long before we manage to exhaust him.

Thus, our latest life adjustment: take him out and introduce him to new experiences. Today, we took him to the coast for the first time.

It was a one-hour car ride, and all things considered, he took it quite well. He woke at 6, and the Guy entertained him while I caught a nap after a restless night. We’re experiencing a heat wave in California, with the result that it was already 76 degrees when Hobbes woke up. Given that it’s always about 5 - 10 degrees cooler inside the house than it is outside, that means it was already well into the 80s at 6 AM. We dressed and packed accordingly.

It may have ended up in the 90s down where we live, but at the coast, the wind chill was -30.

Ocean, Hobbes. Hobbes, meet the Pacific.

As it turned out, he loved the wind. And the wind chill.

Sand, not so much.

Insofar as major road trips go, it was fairly successful. True, we forgot the diaper bag. On the other hand, we remembered the baby, so we ended up net positive.

Right?

Do you know, looking back over the past 9 months of my journal, a body could start to think that I was enamored of Hobbes. And one would be, of course, quite wrong. Enamored is such a strong word. Infatuated, now. I might go as far as to say infatuated….

I’ve been eaten up a bit by work and school lately, which means no updates. Well, so it goes — but the light is visible on the other side of the tunnel now, at least on the work front, which means that I actually have a chance to crawl out of my cave and say hi.

Hi.

I’ll be updating for real soon, because I have a 7 day weekend coming up and you just know I’ll get bored of sleeping in after a couple of days. Or three days, maybe. I could sleep in for three — or four — days and then get bored of it. Or maybe five.

In the meantime, here are pictures of Hobbes, who hit his 9 month birthday on Monday. He’s a happy little kid.

This past Memorial Day weekend we did something we’ve been talking about doing for the last eight months or so: take Hobbes to visit Hakone Gardens. It’s been almost 5 years since we were married there, back in June of 2004, and we haven’t been back since. Every year we talk about it; every year we not only forget, but actually actively forget our wedding anniversary as well.

We fail as romantics.

It was more crowded than I expected. My clearest memories of the place are when I was there with Mom before the wedding (it was raining hard enough for puddles in the parking lot to reach my ankles) and the wedding itself, which meant that the assembly of patrons were, respectively, nobody at all, and all our friends. On Sunday, the parking lot was about half full with cars, and every path in the garden had several family groups wandering down it. We peeled Hobbes out of the car seat — he’s taken to falling asleep every time the car starts, demonstrating the dominance of his sleepy Hirata genes — and bundled him into the stroller.

It was a beautiful day, not too hot, with clear blue skies. It was a lot like the day we got married. I don’t know exactly what I expected; it felt like there should be some kind of significance to it, our first return to the place our marriage started. The Guy pried him out of the stroller fairly quickly (there were a lot of stairs in the garden) and showed him around. “Look, baby!” he crooned. “This is where you began!”

(By any definition, this is a very loose interpretation of ‘began.’ Hobbes wasn’t born until four years later.)

Hobbes stared at green things. He stared at a waterfall. He stared at flowers.

Huh.

His reaction was a hearty, Mrf?

Dad and Grumpypants

I’ve never been gifted with a green thumb, personally. I mean, I try. That is to say, I occasionally labor under a happy delusion that I will grow things that are plant-based, only to lose interest halfway through. Mostly, these things die. Don’t think that didn’t cause me some concern when I decided to have a baby, incidentally. It was a little too late to worry about it once I was pregnant, mind, but the thought did occur to me fairly often near the end that a person who can’t even keep a dandelion from committing suicide has no right to be bringing another life into the world.

Anyway. Visiting Hakone tends to resurrect urges towards being a gardener again. Fortunately, Hobbes’s obvious skepticism about the whole concept of greenery has kept me from buying my own bamboo forest, just as a for instance.

Don’t think it wasn’t hard to restrain myself, either.

You know what’s proving to be a lot harder? Keeping myself from buying koi.

I really want koi.

Really. Really really really.

I don’t think they do well if you don’t water them, though. Then again, neither did plants….

The other day as we were doing an inventory of our pantry — we’re battling an infestation of drugstore beetles, a tiny bug for which I have developed an all-consuming and obsessive hatred — we discovered that for some inexplicable reason, we currently own two giant bags of sugar.

“Well, that’s stupid,” I said.

“Why do we have this?”

“For baking, I suppose. Do they have an expiration date on them?”

“It’s sugar. Does sugar expire?”

(Answer: it doesn’t, if kept in an airtight container and left in a cool, dry location.)

As a diabetic, there are all sorts of stupid things that I shouldn’t do. Many of those things I actually do anyway, but one thing I do not, and that is consume mass amounts of sugar. Two bags full of sugar, to be specific.

“I’ll have to get rid of them,” I said.

“Just throw them away?”

“I’ll bake stuff, I suppose. You’ll have to take them to your work.”

Which is why, last week, I sent the Guy to the office with two pounds of cheesecake brownies and a lemon chiffon cake. It barely made a dent in our sugar supply, so this week, the goal is to get rid of at least half of a bag.

The recipe below comes compliments of my mother’s next door neighbor, who has mostly been a stranger in our lives. For all the comings and goings at our house and Mom’s hospitable personality, going out to meet our neighborhood has never been something we did much; the Snyders, a gregarious and charming couple two doors down were responsible for most of our neighborhood interactions, and it’s because of them that we knew any childless families in the area at all.

One of the few, random interludes when we did have an encounter with the next door neighbor was when she showed up one day at our door to give us a pound cake. “It’s just something I made,” she told us. Bewildered — the Japanese repertoire of culinary arias does not include a stanza for pound cake — but polite, my mother accepted the gift in the spirit it was meant, and shortly after reciprocated (it is the Japanese way to retaliate with immediate escalation when it comes to gifts) with something, I know not what.

The pound cake was incredible. Dad, my sister and I wolfed it down. My mom remained puzzled.

A few days later, hearing through the grapevine — my sister and I pounding on her door to chorus our heartfelt enthusiasm for the cake — that we’d liked it, the neighbor wrote up the recipe and brought it by. It’s been almost 20 years, and I still have that recipe on the original paper she wrote it on.

5 Flavor Pound Cake

1 c. butter, softened
1/2 c. shortening
2 c. sugar
5 eggs
3-1/4 c. sifted cake flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. lemon extract
1 tsp. rum flavoring
1 tsp. coconut flavoring

Cream softened butter and shortening; gradually add sugar to mixture, beating well. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a separate container; add to creamed mixture alternating with milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Mix after each addition. Stir in flavoring. Pour batter into a greased and floured 10 pan (10″ tube). Bake at 325-degrees for 1 hour and 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool cake in pan 10 minutes; remove from pan and cool until warm on a wire rack.

Glaze

1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. water
1/2 tsp. almond extract

Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan; bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add almond extract. Yields about 1/2 c.

After I posted my last post, I spent some time thinking about the whole Mother’s Day thing — “Which was a waste of time,” I told the Guy, “because all I came up with was, hey, I like being a Mom. Hey, I like my Mom. Yay? Which is pretty boring.” To which he gave an unthinking agreement, poor man, for which he will pay later.

As usual for me, I started out on one subject and ended up on another; to wit, by gradual, surprisingly intuitive degrees, to the realization that most of my posts these days are exclusively about Hobbes.

“I’m like a 24-hour Hobbes show. All Hobbes, all the time,” I said. “I’m like one of those obsessive, doting mothers that I used to hate.”

“Look at that tailgating asshole,” said the Guy, unheeding. We were driving down Rengstorff, and as usual, he found someone to hate sharing the street with him. “What a fucker.”

I ignored him right back. It’s the only way to maintain sanity when he drives.

It’s hard to apologize for talking about Hobbes so much, given that he has loomed disproportionately large in our lives over the last seven months. For a small body, he takes up big psychic space — just what you’d expect from any child of mine — and I’m far from being ashamed of that. On the other hand, there is more to life than watching a baby learn how to shove all ten fingers into his mouth, and biological imperatives aside, it’s ridiculous to feel pride when the flesh of your flesh suddenly starts expressing his opinion of mixed vegetables by blowing moist raspberries at you when his mouth is full.

“You know what it is,” I pursued with the Guy, as we headed into Bed, Bath & Beyond. “It’s like Pokemon. Or Final Fantasy. Basically, any RPG or game where you’ve got a little guy–”

“–and you feed him and bathe him–”

“–and take him to battles–”

“–and dress him–”

“–and you know he’s got attainments and special skills available because you see them all greyed out on his attainments ladder, but he can’t get them until one day, voila, he’s leveled up and you have Flying Monkey Coconut Attack, or Spraying Drool of Doom, ATT +10.”

“And you’re so proud,” said the Guy.

“Damn straight,” I said. “You get emotionally invested in your little poke–thing. Twiddlepoop. So proud, I have to write about it. Constantly.”

“So you’re saying motherhood is like Sims.”

“Other way around, I think.”

“And Pokemon,” the Guy continued, carrying the train of thought to its far from inevitable conclusion, “is the Japanese government’s way of getting people to have children.”

“Right,” I said. “…Wait. What?”

“So they can play the game in real life. Raise little Pokebabies and achieve new Pokemon levels. You know, to deal with the population problem over there.” He wandered off to investigate pans.

I raised a fist after him. “Level up!”

Samurai Hobbes

For my very first mother’s day, the Guy gave me a beautiful digital photo frame to take to the office, pre-loaded with the greatest hits of Hobbes pictures.

Hobbes trumped his dad. He gave me a two-hour nap.

I expected to have some profound reflections on my very first Mother’s Day, but somehow those reflections passed me by. Not being a particularly naval-gazing sort to begin with, this is hardly surprising, though maybe it’s a little disappointing; one would think that when one experiences a life-changing event, one could learn something from it in hindsight.

On the other hand, one could be like me and just go with the flow.

Hobbes does not find the act of eating particularly interesting, unless it is being done by his parents, and unless it’s being done by his parents eating things that he’s not allowed to eat. The Guy has occasionally offered him a piece of food by way of a joke, only to end up trying to pry Hobbes’s jaws apart to get it back from him when the kid turns out to have the snapping speed and mandible strength of a starving crocodile.

You want to talk about people not learning from past mistakes, you should meet my husband.

Hobbes has taken to doing random other activities to entertain himself while being fed his bottles. He hums to himself, or he rolls his eyes, or yanks on his ear, or — because he is a boy — farts rhythmically. This afternoon, he was passing the tedium of the process by alternately slapping himself on the thigh and saluting the Roman Imperium. Slap slap slap, slap slap SALUTE. Slap slap, slap, slap slap SALUTE. SALUTE. Slap slap. SALUTE.

It was one of the more incomprehensible and unproductive activities he chooses to behave in, right up there with barking at his play saucer and head-butting his high chair. Whatever the purpose behind these random maneuvers, he takes them very seriously. He is, shall we say, thoughtful. Slap slap. Slap slap. SALUTE. Slap. SALUTE.

One of those irrational maternal urges came over me, and I started kissing him repeatedly on the cheek.

His arm froze, stretched out in mid-salute; his eyes glazed over. Oh God. That woman is doing that thing again. All signs of that burgeoning, nascent intelligence disappeared; his mouth gaped open a little and he stared blankly at the ceiling.

I started to laugh. Laughter precluded kissing, so I gave up the activity. A few seconds later he blinked a couple of times, gave me a wary glance, shivered once, and then started slapping himself on the thigh again.

Slap. Slap. Slap. SALUTE.

Irregular discoveries.

In one of my random jaunts through the endless RSS feed that constitutes my blog reading, I came across a mention of a book called The Ramen King and I by a man named Andy Raskin. I paused and considered. Then I went to Amazon.

A few minutes after that, I googled Andy Raskin. A few minutes after that, I settled in and read one of his essays.

In a few minutes, I am going to go forth and buy his book. When I’m done with it, I’ll pass it on to my sister, who will take it down to Yosemite and pass it around the commune that passes for the seasonal staff there.

Meanwhile, read this story. This evening I’m going to have a serious talk with Mom.

About her intestines.

A transcript may follow. Stay tuned.

In Silicon Valley, we start 'em early.

I bought my Blackberry in January of ‘08, partly because I needed a new phone, but mostly because my company’s software had just come out on Blackberry and we didn’t really have a lot of devices in-house that we could test on. Our company policy is that we get a certain amount of money back on our handheld device purchase if you use it to help test when new software comes out. “Certain amount” only translates to “half” when you’re talking about a device that’s in the price range of, say, the iPhone, but it’s better than none — and the point was moot, in January of ‘08. There was no iPhone. There was only–

The Blackberry. Oh, the Blackberry. The beautiful, lovely Blackberry….

Along with my childhood dream of someday becoming a corporate cog — not even joking about this. When you grow up as a member of a troupe of traveling musicians, your childhood dreams tend to be a lot more … well, taxable — I’ve long had a secret yearning to own a Blackberry. It seems so commercial, somehow. So official. So upper management. If you have a Blackberry, it’s because you wear a three-piece suit and tell people, “Let’s do lunch. Have your people call my people.”

Just thinking about saying that to someone gives me a little thrill inside.

It’s odd, the things we build up in our minds. I set out to buy it with my sister during one of her occasional visits. While she was getting her hair cut by a transvestite (long story, though typical for Sako) I found a Verizon store and hovered determinedly just inside the door until someone was available to help me. “That one,” I told them, when they finally found a free moment. I pointed. It was a thing of beauty. Silver, little buttons, a ‘World Edition’ according to the labeling, though what the hell that meant, I had no idea, except that it sounded cool. Owning one of those would make me a member of an elite crowd, a group of fast-texting, email-checking, workaholic, always-connected obsessive-compulsives who were on the go and in-touch. Work would be life, and life would be work. I would be the ultimate cubicle warrior.

For a while there, it was true, too. That Blackberry was my lifeline. It was my best friend. My thumb had a permanent dent in the fleshy part from replying to emails; it was the first thing I checked when I woke up, sometimes even before my eyes opened. It lived on the headboard of our bed, just within arm’s reach so if I ever had a moment’s insomnia, I could check in and do some work.

“You’re addicted,” the Guy said, when he tried to kiss me one morning and ended up with a mouth full of metal keys. “Somebody needs to do something. You need help.”

“Just a second,” I said. “I just need to answer this email first.”

So it went for a good nine months or so.

And then I had Hobbes.

It’s no joke that parenthood shifts your priorities, almost beyond recognition. The Blackberry gets more use nowadays as a pacifier than a phone. It’s not particularly thrilled about this; it tries to call emergency services on a regular basis when my son’s got a hold of it, presumably with the hope that someone in authority will rescue it from abuse for which it was not meant. A couple of weeks ago, I even lost it for a time — I mislaid it in the office somewhere. Where before, I would have noticed it was missing within minutes and hunted frantically for it until it was found, this time it was an entire 24 hours before I noticed it was gone. Another three days passed before I bothered to do anything about it. When the office manager finally sent out a company-wide email, it returned to me from its travels rebooted and in Spanish, with none of my original settings or phone book information.

I was remarkably indifferent.

“Look, baby,” I said to Hobbes, and showed him the Blackberry, restored to its former glory. He reached for it, as he always does when it’s an expensive electronic device. I let him take it for the obligatory insert-in-mouth operation.

“Hey, you found it,” the Guy congratulated.

“Most expensive pacifier we own,” I remarked, while Hobbes hummed around its keys. Its screen blinked on; it was once more calling emergency services. I tried to wrestle it away from the baby; he squawked angrily and clung to it with sticky fingers. I gave up after a few seconds. I don’t have the energy to put up a real fight against a 7-month old. He’s a motivated individual.

“You’re addicted,” I told him while he stared beadily at me over a mouthful of Blackberry. “You’re my kid alright. You need help.”

“Boop,” he said. Just a second. I just need to eat this email first.

…and…

…and…

…and…

We had a great time.

And so did Grandma and Aunt Sako.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“So we just disembarked, and I’m headed to the baggage claim now. Hobbes was a good boy.”

“Oh … crap. I forgot to leave to pick you up.”

Silence.

“You forgot?”

“I’m leaving now.”

Click.

“Hobbes, your daddy is a goober.”

Hobbes grinned proudly at me. That’s my old man.

“I’m not going to be around for Christmas this year,” Sako said.

“Where’ll you be?” I asked.

“Mexico,” she said, and speared a piece of pickled radish. “Or China,” she added thoughtfully.

“Those are two totally different places.”

“Or Thailand. Or Spain. Or–”

“You haven’t been to Africa.”

She brightened.

“What the hell,” I said.

Mom, who has mastered the art of ignoring the vagaries of the daughter most like her, carried on ignoring and munched stoically through her meal.