faulty vision

In other news, Hobbes smiled at me for the first time today.

“Did you see that?!” I demanded of the Guy, who was changing the baby’s diaper. My voice rose into the supersonic range. “He smiled at me. Smile again, baby! Smile again!”

Hobbes gave me an uncertain look and then slowly went cross-eyed while I started capering around.

“Better get used to her, kid,” the Guy told him sympathetically. “Your mother’s insane.”

I find it odd that I didn’t write much about the election while it happened, though maybe it isn’t really surprising, considering the hiatus I’ve been on with this journal. Parenthood as a new frontier has been all-engrossing, and even given that it was probably the most exciting election we’ve had in my lifetime — I won’t say “an historical election” because really, all elections are by definition historical, but certainly the most pivotal — I found myself unusually detached from the entire thing.

I would hate to think it’s because I’m getting old, because I don’t think that’s it; I had a requisite amount of enthusiasm for My Candidate (I use the capital advisedly) and had no intention of skipping the vote, lost though it would be in the overwhelming consensus of the rest of California. If I’m going to be honest, I’ll say that my stand-offishness was because I didn’t want to get invested in disappointment. I’m at an age where when I say that I expect the worst, I mean that I expect the worst. In earlier years I would talk the cynical talk, but fail to walk the cynical walk. “They won’t,” hid an expectation that “they will,” and the devastation of discovering that I was right on the wrong count hurt: in 2000 and in 2004, even if both losses were deserved — by which I mean to say that the Democratic Party had its head so far up its ass over the last eight years, it was shitting teeth. Not that I felt any bitterness or anything. In 2004, after an ulcer-inducing post-election result, I went Independent. A party that was so impotent that it couldn’t reclaim the presidency from George W. Bush, standard-bearer for a movement that considered ignorance a badge of honor, was not a party I cared to claim as my own.

Looking back on it, I can’t say that there’s anything endemically wrong with my attitude: I expected that the American people would be stupid, and it didn’t happen. I can only win when I lose. By comparison, the Republican platform seemed to hope that the American people would be stupid, which goes beyond cynicism to flat-out tragedy.

See? I can summon froth at will. It’s just that the political cappuccino machine of my soul is temporarily on energy save mode.

My Candidate, for those who care, was Barack Obama, even while Hillary Clinton was in the running. It annoyed me that pundits kept asking, “Well, what will minority women go with? Race or gender?” (although let’s be frank, they didn’t say minority, they said black, because there are only two racial minority groups in the United States and the other one comes from south of the border). Rehash though it is of points made elsewhere, even minority women are capable of selecting a candidate based on more than simple biology.

I won’t bother to go into the reasons why I liked Obama, because those reasons are moot at this point; what’s important now is whether he will be remembered for more than that simple biology that catapulted this Democratic primary and presidential race into an international frenzy. He has promised great things, and the cynic in me says, “As if,” while a smaller, increasingly agitated 20-year-old inside me shrills, “He might.” What interests me more at this point is whether the Democrats, having seized control of much of the government, will now managed to get their acts together and accomplish something worthwhile, or if they will manage yet again to pull failure out of the jaws of victory.

Still, I’m proud of my peeps — my variegated, male and female voting citizens of the United States of America peeps — for having made this choice for the 44th President.

And so is Hobbes.

This is his post-Presidential returns face.

…and on a slightly tangential subject, this is his post-Prop 8 face.

We are not happy about Prop 8, which we regard quite frankly as stupid, simplistic though that word is to describe the state’s elimination of marriage for a certain segment of the population. Here is a case where cynicism turned out, sadly, to be absolutely right on, though not for the reasons that I expected. Ironic that the turnout of so many to vote Obama in also ended up shooting Prop 8 in the foot; among other numbers in the disappointing-but-not-really-a-surprise category, 70% of black voters elected to deny gays the right to marry; 62% of first time voters the same; more than 4 to 1 of Republicans, likewise.

When the Guy was born, 13 states in the US had laws on the books prohibiting different races from getting married. 1970 wasn’t so long ago, and it looks like the trend continues to this day. While I am moved by the protests taking place across the United States, they also worry me, because if we have learned nothing from history, it is that change needs time. Those who believe in same-sex marriage rights are still significantly outnumbered by those who do not, and when push came to shove, those opposed shoved back with a vengeance. A lot of things need to happen before things change, and wise people are working on it. Meanwhile, I worry about the pendulum of action and reaction; push hard enough, and the consequences may be worse than we think.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that eventually same-sex marriages will be passed across the United States, that the Defense of Marriage Act will fall, and that many (maybe even most) people will manage to yank their heads out of their asses — or if not, the next generation will be able to rise above their elders and make a world big enough to encompass difference. Hobbes will be raised to demand it and to work for it. Meanwhile, in Cynical Land, I have the grim satisfaction of saying, “I told you so,” — which really isn’t satisfying at all.

I would not make a good diagnostician, in part because I have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. I would make an unconvincing hypochondriac for this very reason, since I can’t connect the dots: I cannot go from red spot to pustule to MRSA to imminent death. 1 + 1 does not equal 3 for me, but neither does it equal 2. In fact, 1 never comes near the other 1, and is a completely different digit altogether, maybe even a VI or an omega. If I see a red dot on my skin, it’s a miracle if I manage to get beyond, “Oh, red dot,” to “oh, pimple.” Chances are high that my thought process will stop at, “Red dot,” and then move on to some completely unrelated thought based on whatever is shiniest in the vicinity. “Oh, chipmunk,” say, or “hm, microwave.” As a result, I do not speculate, and I do not come to reasonable conclusions, and especially I do not correlate. Most of all, I do not worry.

I’m the kind of patient that doctors hate, the “by the way” patient, who comes in with an issue and is seen for that issue, and then adds as the doctor is heading out the door: “By the way, there’s this other symptom, it probably isn’t important, but–” Combined with symptom 1, symptom 2 leads to a totally different diagnosis than 1 by itself, a diagnosis that involves a future of amputations, organ transplants and premature balding — but more importantly, requires that the doctor close the door, come back to his patient, and start all over again from scratch. I do not have colds. I have sneezing, I have sniffling, I have a fever, and I have a headache, and only the repetition of that combination of symptoms repeatedly over the course of many years has drilled it into my head that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4. Now I recognize that combination as “seasonal cold,” and will diagnose it confidently as such.

Which leads me to another condition that I have never been able to identify until now, mostly because I never connected the dots. The Guy had it a few months ago. “What is it?” I asked him, apropos the condition. “I’ve heard of it before, but what is it really?”

“A vein swells,” the Guy said.

“And?”

“And,” he said. “There’s itching and burning, and it hurts to–” He went on to explain in detail. Like romance, the TMI of physical ailments is one of the first casualties of a long-term relationship.

“Oh,” I said, and sympathized without really comprehending.

“You’ve never had it before?”

“No.”

“You will eventually,” he said darkly. I could have told him that I have had each symptom that he’d described, sometimes all together at the same time, and he could have said well, in that case you had what I have you idiot, ha ha — but I did not and he did not so we both remained blissfully ignorant.

Well, not blissfully. I went out and got him some cooling gel.

This brings me to the things that I am thankful for this season. A few weeks ago, in acute discomfort, I remembered the conversation I had with the Guy and — unusually for me — actually thought about it a little more. In a rare show of medical arithmetic, I added up the numbers and got 4.

Oh, I thought. Oh.

So my list of things I am grateful for this year. In no particular order….

1. My son, the moon-faced assassin of joy.
   
2. Caffeine.
   
3. My husband.
   
4. Friends and family.

5. My job and coworkers.
   
6. Health insurance.
   
7. The ability to be content.
   
8. A sense of humor.

9. Flannel.
   
10. Preparation H.
    

This journal is becoming All Hobbes, All the Time, for which I apologize — and yet, I can’t seem to help but wallow in the fact of my son. Let me say it in capital letters: My Son, who is still a miracle that I haven’t quite grasped in its entirety. He isn’t mobile yet, but he is slowly mastering the butt wiggle, wherein he squirms and kicks until he moves in one direction or another. I somehow doubt that his directional capabilities are up to par with his wiggle faculties, but somehow or another he manages to gravitate towards whatever it is that he wants, more or less.

The nights are getting colder lately, and the combination of serious chill plus his 2 month immunization shots — three at once this past Friday, which rendered him drowsy between fits of abject self-pity that was both heart-breaking and really loud — led The Guy to give him a special treat. I crawled into bed Friday night to discover that there was a small, tinnily snoring body in the middle of the bed.

“What–?” I started.

The Guy snorted, waved a hand, and I let the matter rest. It really was quite cold, and hard-heartedness aside, Hobbes really looked quite doleful, even in his sleep.

One could ask how much space a 10 pound 2 month old baby could possibly take, and the answer to that is, “A lot.” Most of the time he sleeps with his fists balled up and clenched to his face, as though he’s worried someone will remove his cheeks while he’s unconscious if he doesn’t make sure they’re firmly attached. In our bed though, he apparently felt secure enough to throw his arms out wide and lay claim to territory in the grand old Imperialist tradition. Frustrated by my own inability to stretch my arms — every time I tried, there would be a busily buzz-sawing little body obstructing my natural sleep position — I rolled over onto my side and fell asleep, balanced on the very edge of the bed and secure in the knowledge that here, I could not possibly squash my son.

I woke up disoriented and alarmed at 2 AM to feel a potato-shaped heat source squashed firmly up against my back. And it was pummeling me. Whack. Whack whack whack.

The Guy finds it funny that no matter how many times I return Hobbes to the center of the bed, somehow during the night he will find a way to squirm up against me and take possession of whatever body part I’ve left unwarily exposed to him. Having laid claim to it, he will eventually start flailing at it with arms and legs. Whack whack. It makes for a less than restful night, not that a two month old baby is in any way inclined towards giving his parents leisure to sleep. Five days later, he’s still spending his nights in our bed, and concluding each cycle of sleep with the inevitable wriggle and whack.

“It’s ridiculous,” I groused to my husband. “How can someone that small take up that much room?”

“That sounds familiar,” he remarked to no one in particular.

“He just flails all over–”

“And that.”

“–and I’ll be lying there, sound asleep, when suddenly out of the blue for no reason whatsoever he hits me–”

“…and that.”

“It’s like he has no respect for boundaries. Shut up.”

“Karma,” said The Guy, and smiled beautifically.

I left Hobbes napping on the sofa in the living room and wandered over to the kitchen to read and drink some tea. A few minutes into my book, I heard a thump and a squeak from the other room. Predictably, I dropped everything and dashed into the living room, where I found Hobbes on the floor, snoring contentedly into the carpet with his face mashed up against one leg of his swing set.

It took me a while to stop laughing. He was quite indignant at being awoken by his giggling mother, who wanted to determine for herself that he was not concussed, broken, or significantly bruised.

It amazes me that people like me are allowed to care for children.

One of the advantages to having a family spread out across the west coast is that it’s easier to be fond of them. The memory of how irritating a relative is fades a lot when you know they can’t reach you unless you decide to pick up the phone when it rings, or they show up unannounced at your front door — and then you always have the option of not opening it, if you’re willing to accept that the peppermint of guilt that your mother will spice her conversation with, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

The downside of this is that when there is something you want to share with them, your options are mostly limited to email and to phone. The written word is all well and good, but that assumes that both parties are literate in English to a certain baseline level, and that miscommunication will be limited to the eloquence of the sending party. Also that the recipient knows what email is. The phone, on the other hand, removes the alleviating impact of body language, which can remove the sting from particularly annoying comments, for example.

And you just can’t communicate a person that way. You can’t send a person’s quirks, his personality, his facial expressions, and his growth across a phone line like that.

So Skype. We got a Logitech plug-in webcam that just arrived today, though my laptop has a perfectly functioning one itself — thank you, Mac! — but this one is better. My sister made the initial discovery that Skype allowed you to do video calls, though maybe “discover” isn’t the proper word, since we were peripherally aware of it, but felt the enthusiasm about video conversation that crocodiles feel towards dentists, let’s say. Having Hobbes has changed that. My mother and sister are in Seattle, and Hobbes is changing a lot, and quickly. He’s the newest member of a very small, rapidly aging family, and as such gets all the awed worship of the old towards the young. We brought the laptop into the bathroom with us so Mom and Sako could watch him take his bath; he cooperated (as he had no choice) with perfect cordiality, barring a rather noisy objection when it came to taking him out of the water.

The Guy’s relatives and best friend are in England, and we’re working on getting the former hooked up as well. The latter has already made Hobbes’s acquaintance over a carefully scheduled video conference that managed to catch the hero of the hour in a surprisingly good mood. One by one, bit by bit, long distance relationships are ending up parked in our living room — or our bathroom, in my mother’s case. The miles are shortening; the barriers are dropping.

It’s fascinating to think of the things that Hobbes’s generation will be taking for granted, and comparing that with the things that were fresh and new when I was young. My parents were the only poor Japanese people to cross the ocean, in the ’70s and ’80s; the television I grew up with barely had color, and was about the size of my head. Not my grown-up head, but my 3-year old one. It was wider than it was tall, and involved cathodes and tubes. Our telephones were dialed using actual dials, and nobody asked if you had a rotary phone because there wasn’t any other type. My parents owned a polaroid camera that was the size of a small dachshund, and that was high tech.

Now look at what we can do.

I may not have expected to live in Tomorrow, with all its technological wonders, but damned if I won’t enjoy taking advantage of it. Hobbes, poor boy, will live in the public eye, his bathtub splashings and cranky flailings broadcast willy-nilly for the entertainment of our friends and relatives across the world — but that’s his generation, and what they’ll be used to.

And honestly. Look at that hair. What parent could pass up the chance to preemptively embarrass her son?

I had lunch today with Jennifer, an old colleague from the Island of the Purple Monkeys who, like me, survived its transition into the hands of the smurfs. It was her first time meeting Hobbes, which was the ostensible reason for our meet-up, but we spent much of the time talking about what was happening with the Island — beg pardon, the smurfs — which is par for the course for us. We’ve met up for lunch several times since leaving the Island. Both of us have moved on to jobs that are in every possible way better: in environment; in salary; in benefits; in ethics; in product. We remind each other of that every time — how much better life is, how much happier we are — and yet inevitably we turn back to conversation about them. The Island. The Smurfs.

It’s all very well to say we’ve moved on when in reality, we haven’t.

I think it’s inevitable that we talk about our Dark Times when we get together. It is our common ground, the shared experience that holds us together, a romp through Gehenna that has miraculously found us mostly sane on the other side. The bitterness of our conversation has receded over the last year and a half and has taken on a tint of half-marveling nostalgia, a kind of “can you believe–?” that pities our younger selves’ stupidity.

“Can you believe how many hours we worked?”

“Can you believe we took pay cuts?”

“Can you believe what so-and-so said to me about such-and-such?”

“Can you believe we’re still talking about this?”

I run into coworkers from those days from time to time, at farmers’ markets and the like. I work with one now, in fact; I exchange emails with others. Another just announced she had her second child two days ago: I sent her my congratulations. We are friends in the way that survivors of some great and traumatic experience are friends; we gather at intervals to talk in hushed voices about things that should never have come to pass.

I received an email a few days ago from one of the relics of the Island, who had just been laid off by the Smurfs this past Friday.

“They’re still around?” a fellow survivor asked me, baffled, when I told him, followed by a still more baffled: “She was still working for them?”

“You just can’t help some people,” another said sadly, after having much the same reaction to the news.

In retrospect, there’s something more than a little pathetic about our stints on the Island, like the willful blindness of an abused woman returning time and time again to her abuser. Even the sane can have their moments of insanity. Five years worth, in my case.

“Can you believe they had to lay us off for us to leave?”

Some experiences are worth having, if only so you can rehash them endlessly later.

Hobbes will be eight weeks old tomorrow, a milestone that has somehow managed to creep up on me all unawares. He’s changed in that time — changed considerably — and if it weren’t for the fact that I have pictures documenting the change, I would suspect him of being a totally different round-headed Asian baby than the original round-headed Asian baby that I was originally handed in the hospital.

Knowing I have a habit of anthropomorphising the inanimate, and attributing personality to that which has none, I’ve been trying not to do the same for my son who is, let’s be totally honest here, basically a squeaky toy in human form. Unfortunately, he hasn’t read the manual. While he isn’t at the point where he can really socialize, lacking the capacity to smile (not that we give him much to smile about, I confess) he is certainly capable of conveying his opinion through a variety of expressions, ranging from the acutely anxious to the deeply disapproving. I may not attribute personality to him, but he’s got plenty to spare.

He endures the fumblings of his incompetent parents, as he has no choice but to do so. This does not necessarily mean he has to enjoy it, but he tolerates us as best as he can. When things get too irritating, or when we react too slowly to his determined attempts at psychic communication, he opens his mouth wide and wails at us with an urgency unseen since Jerusalem fell to the paynim. The results of this are mixed, but he persists nonetheless, eternally hopeful that this time, the bumbling big people with their clod-like feet and booming voices will get it right. There is a vast chasm of incomprehension between child and parents, over which we stare at each other with equal parts bemusement and frustration, with a soupcon of hilarity. “Use your grown-up words,” I keep telling him, with little to no effect. He is either incapable or unwilling — I personally believe it is the latter — and continues to wail at the top of his lungs. He produces no tears, which somewhat diminishes his credibility.

“Goddammit,” he seems to be saying (because he is my child and is fond of vigorous word choices). “How hard can this be?” And I change perfectly clean diapers, attempt to shove my breasts into his wide-open mouth, or bend him over and whack desperately at his back in an attempt to make him burp up gas that he might or might not be reserving for the middle of the night, when exhausted parents will be woken by the sound of flatulence that could blow down the walls of Jericho.

For those who are wondering, those are socks on his hands in the picture above. We have failed utterly in keeping them on his feet, so the next logical step was to put them on his hands. He is resigned to this example of parental idiocy, and allows us the very small triumph until he works them off a few hours later. Our house is dotted with small white socks; they turn up in the most unexpected places, under dishes, on top of pianos, inside CD players. Having had a nomad’s relationship with my own socks in the past, I find this a reassuring indication that the hospital got the distribution of child to parent right, and continue optimistic that someday we will be able to graduate in the sock department from one set of limbs to the other.

“You poor chumps,” his expression says sympathetically when we make the attempt. So far it is: Child: 12; Parents: 0.