faulty vision

This week has been longer than most. Long. Loooooooooong. One of those weeks that never end, exhaustion bookended by calamity bookended by tedium–

I started an exercise program this week, something that was long overdue since Hobbes was born. I’m not the fittest of people in the best of times, but back when I was going to Aikido on a quasi-regular basis, you could bounce a quarter off of my ass, it was so firm. (Question mark: why a quarter? Why not a penny? Why not, for argument’s sake, a Sacagawea dollar coin?) This is because so much of Aikido is falling down and then getting back up again, an act that by definition requires a lot of ass muscle development.

I was good at falling down. I used to do it all the time for the heck of it. Only during Aikido was this considered a commendable skill, which was just as well; for a time there, I was practically a professional klutz.

Two weeks after I gave birth to Hobbes, I had lost most of my weight gain; by the time I was seen by the obstetrician 6 weeks post-birth, I was down to my pre-pregnancy weight. The fact that I’m now 5 pounds over that is therefore solely my fault, and not my son’s. True, there was a realignment of body mass — what used to be my stomach is now around my hips, while any excess poundage that might have been giving my boobs perk and lift has migrated down to supplement what’s left of my stomach. There is a definite spongy quality to my midsection and my shadow has taken on an unflattering wine-glass shape. This isn’t the point. Redistribution of fat is one thing; having more of it is what we object to.

The exercise program I’ve embarked on is one that I’ve plucked out of the bowels of the internet. A friend took on the challenge of the cool runnings “from the couch to 5k” training regimen. I’d looked at it a few years back and decided against it for a few reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I hate to run.

Back in those days, I had alternatives. I went to Aikido and got my ass kicked around a lot. Nowadays, Hobbes makes that impossible — the Aikido schedule is incompatible with having a small child and working full time — so I have to fall back on this painful reminder of high school phys. ed. classes.

My parent friends assure me that this is not a bad skill to have. Once Hobbes becomes mobile, running will be my de facto state.

Sako was in town for all of three days. I saw her for all of thirty minutes.

“Bring my nephew,” she ordered me over the phone, “and can you drive me to the airport?”

Well, yes.

There really isn’t all that much to tell about this particular visit. Her primary interest was in seeing her boyfriend John again, as he is winding up his time at Stanford Hospital and heading off to Patagonia for a six week jaunt. The last time he was there, he found a human head. (Or was it a human body without a head? At the rate Sako and John find body parts and bodies, I start to lose track.)

At her friend’s house, where she was staying, I was introduced to a tall, athletic-looking young man who was preparing to get on a bike. “This is John,” her friend Mary said.

I numbly shook hands, puzzled. What I wanted to say was, “We’ve met.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” John said. He had a firm grip. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“But,” I still wanted to say. “We’ve met–”

–and then Sako’s friend Mary kissed John in a, let’s say, not platonic fashion, and I stood there, still confused, while Sako happily kissed Hobbes all over his own puzzled little face. I felt that Sako was taking this display of affection awfully cavalierly, considering how passionate she was about her boyfriend–

My family and friends will tell you that I’m slow on the uptake. Oh, I realized at last. This is a different, not-Sako’s-boyfriend John.

I forget sometimes that the name “John” is widely used in the world by people who have never dated my sister.

In retrospect, it’s probably a good idea I didn’t say anything. I’m not entirely sure which would’ve been more socially embarrassing: admitting I’d mistaken a complete stranger for my sister’s boyfriend, or admitting that I can’t actually tell tall, blond, slightly shaggy white boys apart….

I’ve signed up for thing-a-day.com, which proposes to make me create one thing a day, every day, for the month of February.

I’m not good at sustained creativity, but February is a short month; there is a 70-30 chance that I might actually make myself chug through to the end. At any rate, it’ll motivate me to blog on an almost daily basis.

Not that I’ll have anything to say, but when has that ever stopped me, anyway?

I do not think outside the box.

I like the box. It gives me framework. There are boundaries and corners where I can stick stuff. If it rains, I have cover; if it floods, I can float in it. There are dimensions and there is room for growth, because you can stick more boxes onto the first box. What, exactly, is wrong with thinking within the box?

My instincts demand the box. And that is all I have to say about work today.

So let’s talk about poop.

(Those are not, for those of you who are keeping track, two related thoughts.)

On second thought, I’ve decided not to talk about poop, so you’ll have to deal with disappointment and hope I change my mind some other day. My mother was in town this past weekend — from Wednesday night through Sunday afternoon, to be exact — on one of her random work jaunts that don’t actually conform to any schedule. This time she was here because a group of violin teachers that she’s friends with invited her into town to do some masterclasses. Mom could best be described as an occasional itinerant teacher; in March she’s heading to Hawaii, for instance. Sako comes by her own restlessness legitimately.

Mom jumped at the chance, of course. If it had been just me in California, she would’ve given it a pass, “But we thought she’d probably say yes if we asked her this time,” said Jackie, nodding knowingly at Hobbes.

This wasn’t a huge stretch.

Most of the teachers in this group are women I’ve known since I was a baby. The fact that they still talk to me after knowing me as the really horrible person I was between the ages of, oh, say 3 years and 23 attest to their patience, compassion, and surreal levels of tolerance. Now that Hobbes has come along, they’ve expanded their horizons to encompass him as well, with obvious enthusiasm.

“They all asked after him,” Mom said brightly, when I talked to her on the phone before her trip. “I have given away so many photographs. Everybody wants one. Here and in Japan, I have sent so many.”

My grandmother, she informed me, thinks there is something remarkable about the baby. “She thinks he will be like Obama, maybe,” Mom said, and you could hear the pride in her voice. My grandson will be a genius and incidentally save the world.

I watched my son, seated on my lap, attempt to eat his own elbow. He was unsuccessful, which annoyed the crap out of him. I felt compelled to temper Mom’s expectations of future greatness. “I dropped him last week,” I told her.

There was a small silence. “Is he hurt?” she asked.

“He’s fine.”

There was another small silence. “Did you drop him on his head?”

I watched Hobbes try to shove his fist up his nose and was tempted to say yes. “No.”

“Everybody thinks that about their grandson though,” I added, hastily changing the subject. “I mean, nobody says, ‘I think my grandson is going to grow up to be an idiot.’”

“Yuhri,” my mom said reproachfully. Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhri. Hobbes face-planted in my stomach and then tried to gouge his eyes out with his foot. “You have to be more careful.”

“Oh, like you never dropped us when we were kids.”

It was a question. She answered it. “I didn’t.”

Damn.

“You used to fall over all by yourselves,” she added with nostalgia. “You would run and then tip over– Masako used to climb high when she was a baby, and then fall off.” Which just goes to show that we all pretty much start as we mean to go on.

Hobbes yawned and then whacked himself soundly in the balls with his fist.

Ominous.

In view of Mom’s visit, the timing of our flu could have been … better, let’s say, although there really is no good time to have the flu. She ended up staying a couple of nights at Jackie’s home nearby, Jackie being one of the aforementioned violin teachers who invited her into town. It was a case of duty over desire, a sentiment I sympathized with. Having had her services and travel paid for, it seemed hard on them to risk my mother coming down with flu just so she could hang out with her grandson for a couple of extra days.

It was worth it, regardless. When Mom and Hobbes finally met up, it was true love all over again. I’ll regret not having filmed it, but the two of them giggled and snickered and grinned at each other in their own private, happy little world of grandma and grandson. It gave me a weird feeling of false nostalgia. I almost remember being Hobbes with Mom playing with me when I was a baby. I know I don’t, but watching her with Hobbes, I could almost swear that I do. . . .

On top of everything else, Hobbes has come down with a partial cold. He has no fever or cough, but he has a chronically running nose which periodically allows him to blow bubbles from his left nostril. It is very attractive. Add this to the fact that he is suffering an outbreak of baby acne across 90% of his face, has seen fit to claw several long scratches across his forehead during the night, and continues to lose hair at a rapid rate across the top of his head, and you will understand why lately I have been experiencing some chagrin whenever I take him in to daycare these days. Compared to the rest of the babies at the daycare, almost all of which could be paid to model for the latest Gerber campaign, my poor child looks like a reject trial run from Dr. Frankenstein’s home hobbyist line.

I feel like apologizing every time I take him in. “He’s actually much cuter than this,” I almost-but-don’t-quite say. I keep myself from doing so by finding something else to say instead.

“I think you’re going to have to change his diaper. I’m pretty sure he pooped on the way here.”

The daycare providers hold his bottom up to their noses and sniff him to make sure. Hobbes always looks mildly surprised by this. Me, I’m just plain smart. Distracting them from his face by directing them to his bottom — yes, yes. Good plan. Strategic.

Right.

A little something to get you started after the weekend….

The things parents do to their kids, man. Honestly.

The Guy was reading my journal.

“Are you criticizing my lightswitch?” he demanded from the foot of the bed.

A little later…

“I didn’t say that context switching is the most efficient way to change state. You’re totally misquoting me. I said it was the most expensive way. You have to change that.”

“Mmfn,” I said with my face in the pillows.

“Or else I won’t get anymore jobs,” he insisted.

I dragged myself out of incipient sleep. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll change it.”

A few seconds later…

“And you totally made this last thing a step, when it isn’t a step, it’s just me showing you that I was done. That isn’t fair.”

I started to type.

His nose suddenly appeared around the screen of my laptop, twitching like a nervous gerbil’s. “What are you typing?” he demanded. “What lies are you spreading about me now– you can’t type that!”

I hit publish and went back to bed.

“Genius is always misunderstood,” the Guy said.

“–if you could make another bottle for tonight,” I said, banging around the kitchen with my breast pump.

The Guy said, “You already started one.”

“Another one, I mean. He usually goes through two a night nowadays.”

“Oh.” There was a short pause, and then the Guy was bouncing around the cabinets, eyes shining happily. “Look. I have to show you this great new way I have of preparing bottles. It’s so much more efficient. Here. I’ll show you the trick. It uses three bottles.”

“He only needs–” I began, but he’d already laid them out on the counter: one, two, three. One of them, the one that I had set up for the night, was 4 ounces full of water and capped. Let’s call this bottle 1, shall we? Right.

“Watch this,” he said.

I watched.

Here is what he did.

1. Poured 2 ounces of hot water into bottle 2.
   
2. Poured 4 scoops of formula (enough to make 4 ounces) into bottle 2.
   
3. Capped bottle 2.
   
4. Shook up bottle 2.
   
5. Opened bottle 2.
   
6. Poured half of bottle 2 into bottle 3.
   
7. Uncapped bottle 1.
   
8. Poured 2 ounces of bottle 1 water into bottle 2.
   
9. Poured 2 ounces of bottle 1 water into bottle 3.
   
10. Capped bottle 2.
    
11. Capped bottle 3.
    
12. Shook both bottles.
    
13. Beamed proudly at me. “Ta da!” he said, and gestured grandly. “Two bottles.”

He was so pleased with himself, it was like kicking a puppy to point out the flaw in his process. However, I am a devoted and loving wife; this is what devoted and loving wives do. I forced myself to perform my wifely duty.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said.

The PMI, which stands for the Project Management Institute — yes, there is an institute; yes, the job title I have is apparently some sort of … thing — has all sorts of definitions for what project managers do. It involves a lot of corporate words like “objectives” and “execution” and “managing the triple constraint.”

Whatever.

Here is my definition for who a project manager is. The project manager is the person in the room who’s got the sense not to piss on an electric fence. No, I’ll go you one further. The project manager is the person in the room who not only has the sense not to piss on an electric fence, but will also go to the trouble to make sure nobody else does either.

Now you know what my job is. And part of my job, what they pay me for, is taking common sense and making other people follow it. This is called creating process. It’s not as easy as it sounds; not because common sense is all that hard, but because in software, you oftentimes work with people who are genetically wired not to have the common sense of a domesticated turkey. These are people so intellectually complicated, they had to come up with an acronym (KISS) to remind themselves to do things the straightforward way. (Keep It Simple, Stupid.) These are people so pathologically curious, rather than walk up the 15 stairs to the living room and flip a switch, they will design complicated linux-based open source software to turn on the front door light from the computer downstairs just to see if it’s possible, and then argue with you about the merits of doing it over wireless.

Is my example perhaps a little specific?

Want to know why?

“Why the hell wouldn’t you just fill two bottles full of water, fill them with formula, and be done with it?” I asked.

“It’s more efficient this way,” the Guy insisted.

“In what universe?”

“Look. Anybody will tell you that context switching is the most expensive way to change state.”

“And anybody in the real world would tell you that you’re a dumbass. Look at this. Three bottles. How is that more efficient?”

“I bet if we did a timed trial, my way would be faster than your way.”

“My way,” I said flatly. “My way.”

My way.

1. Fill bottle 1 with 4 ounces of water.
   
2. Fill bottle 2 with 4 ounces of water.
   
3. Pour enough formula for 4 ounces into bottle 1.
   
4. Pour enough formula for 4 ounces into bottle 2.
   
5. Cap bottle 1.
   
6. Cap bottle 2.
   
7. Shake both bottles.

“How is that in any way, shape or form–” I fizzed.

“Genius,” declared the Guy, “is always–”

–but that was where we came in, so never mind.

By way of xkcd.com…

We watch American Idol.

Sorry.

“She’s 28?” the Guy said incredulously at one of the auditioners. I glanced at the screen; there was a shiny-faced, haggard woman on TV. “She doesn’t look 28.” And she didn’t. She looked in her 40s.

“Do I look that bad?” I asked.

The Guy tore his gaze away from the TV to look at me. Then he refocused on the show. “Well….” he said.

There was a slightly tense silence. “…No,” he said at last. Uncertainly.

“You were walking on a precipice with that answer.”

He grinned at me.

Prick.

“Where were you when Obama was sworn in, Mommy?”

“Puking up my guts with the flu, honey.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, there was more, but you really don’t want to hear about that end of me.”

I dropped Hobbes.

Babies and small children have a charming trick of suddenly arching their backs and hurling themselves backwards. I don’t know why they do it; I’ve seen some do this in the middle of temper tantrums (mine does it when he’s upset about the shape of my breast, for instance. What does he want from me, anyway? I’m 35 years old. So they’re not perky anymore. Deal with it, little man) but Hobbes occasionally does it because — I don’t know why. He feels like hanging upside-down?

This evening, I was holding him in the crook of my elbow while I was rearranging his diaper changing pad. I was distracted, I admit it, but I would have sworn that my hold on him was tight enough. He watched me shift the pad, stuffed both his fists in his mouth, and then dove backward.

My grip wasn’t secure enough.

You know how they say when you get into a car accident, you can see things happening in slow motion? It was sort of like that. There was a split second where time stretched out and I saw him somersaulting backwards and flop against the side of the changing table. I grabbed after him, and my hand brushed something soft and squashy. Then he was face down on the floor. I think I might have screamed.

He didn’t move for a long time. It seemed like forever, but it was probably more like a second or two, long enough for him to take a deep inhalation so he could share his rage with the world. A second was how long it took me to break the most basic of first aid rules after a major fall and snatch him up from the floor.

“Is everything okay?” the Guy called from downstairs.

Right on cue, Hobbes opened his mouth and shrieked. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Worse than birth, worse than bottle-feeding, worse than the time I dressed him up in a fuzzy bear suit for Halloween. I can’t blame him. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, too.

I answered the Guy — I don’t remember exactly what I said — and he came racing upstairs to find me rocking on the floor with Hobbes in my arms. About all you could see of him was open mouth and white cheeks. Of the two of us, it was a little hard to tell who was more upset; of the three of us, it was the Guy who was the pragmatist about it all. He peeled the baby out of my arms and felt him up and down. Hobbes was rigid as a board from concentrating on his fury, but after about half a minute he began flailing crankily at the hands that were patting him all over.

“He’s fine,” the Guy decided after a quick examination. “Nothing’s broken.” The way the baby’s little arms and legs were flopping about, that was obvious enough. “He’s more scared than hurt.”

I gibbered at him. A few seconds later, Hobbes hiccuped pitifully and sniffled into silence. He discovered his reflection in the mirrored door to the closet and peered at it blearily. “See?” the Guy said.

I burst into tears.

Let’s just say that I am not the person you want by your side during an emergency, and draw a curtain over the rest of that pathetic scene.

He was a sad, sad baby; I was a guilty, guilty mother. We took him downstairs and kept him awake for an hour past his bedtime to make sure he was okay. His pupils were dilating just fine and he didn’t vomit or act any differently than his normal kept-up-late self. I balanced him on my lap. He snuffled. “He’s not smiling at me,” I told the Guy mournfully. Hobbes was avoiding direct eye contact; every time I tried to catch his gaze he would deliberately look elsewhere, as though he’d already filled his quota of Mom for the day. All sorts of awful thoughts had been running through my head since he’d fallen: aneurysm; hemorrhagic stroke– I opened my mouth to say, “I think he’s brain damaged. I think I brain damaged our son.”

The Guy grinned at me. “Do you think he’s mad at you?” he asked.

I would like to note for the record that my husband was incredibly callous and heartless throughout this entire experience.

The internet’s advice was to trust my instincts. My instincts were to wake up every medical professional between here and New Jersey. The internet is stupid. My rational self told me that this sort of thing probably happened all the time, but that I needed to call the doctor’s office to make sure I was doing the right thing. I put him down for the night, then got on the phone.

I was right about it happening a lot. A lot. The advice nurse was kindly but firm about it: I did the right things, and was behaving like a rational adult. Congratulations. (I didn’t tell her that I was trying to keep myself from asking her to call the police on me because I was a terrible mother.)

“Since he hit the side of his forehead, he might have a black eye tomorrow,” the advice nurse told me cheerfully.

The daycare ladies are going to love that. It’s just as well I didn’t ask the nurse to call the cops on me. They’ll probably do it for me.

As a result of the conversation with the advice nurse, I have instructions to wake the baby up every four hours. “Make sure he’s aware,” the nurse said. “That he recognizes you and is acting normally. If he doesn’t, then he’ll have to be seen.” Every four hours, I get to wake him up. This is sort of like turnabout is fair play, except that I have too much guilt to enjoy it. I’ve already tried to wake him up once; I lifted him out of the crib by the armpits and peered at him. His arms stuck straight out, he peeled open one eye to stare at me, closed it, opened up the other one to verify it was really me, looked faintly incredulous, then fell asleep.

“Pssst,” I hissed, and blew on his face.

He snored at me.

I blew on him again. Hissed. Kissed his nose. It twitched. “Hobbes,” I said. “Wake up.” He snored harder. It was actually pretty impressive; there aren’t many people out there who can sleep while being dangled in mid-air.

“Wake up,” I said, and turned him upside-down. Carefully. He opened up one of his eyes again, blinked it blearily at my face, then let it roll up. He was asleep again.

If a look of deep disgust counts as recognition — and I argue that in my son, it does — my first wake-up call was a success. The next one is in two hours.

It’s going to be a long night.

The Guy is sick.

“I don’t get sick often,” he said, flat on his back on the sofa, “but when I get sick, I get sick.”

Hobbes, who was cozily snuggled up in his armpit and practicing sitting up, looked solemn.

He usually does.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, and for whatever completely random reason, Hobbes’s daycare has chosen this to be one of the holidays that they choose to honor. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered that outside of banks and government offices, but so it goes. Hobbes is at home, which makes the third day in a row he’s with us all day. I’m thrilled.

Him, not so much. Tough.

Unfortunately, this throws our plans a bit out of whack. We were originally going to both work from home and take turns taking care of Hobbes while we did so. The Guy’s flu — that’s what we’ve decided what it is — makes that completely impractical. He was up most of the night, suffering as silently as he was capable of managing, while Hobbes slept longer than he ever has before. I split the difference, popping up like a jack-in-the-box with a loose spring to take care of the Guy and occasionally check on Hobbes to make sure he was still alive. As might be expected, work has been a wash today. I’ve spent most of it tending to Hobbes, who has find the entire thing hilarious for some small-brained reason he can’t explain to me, and taking care of the Guy insofar it’s possible to take care of a man in a quasi-coma.

“Don’t go too close to Daddy, Hobbes,” I told the baby. “He’s sick and looks like crap, doesn’t he, honey?”

“Thanks,” said the Guy.

“What we’re worried about here is the fact that every disease Daddy brings home, Mommy gets times a thousand,” I cooed at the top of my son’s head. He is shedding hair at a disconcerting rate, and nowadays the top view of him is like a miniaturized model of the anatomy of a combover. “We don’t want Mommy to get sick. Mommy will kill Daddy.”

The Guy sniffed. “You’re safe. You had the flu shot.”

I brightened. “I did, didn’t I?” I’d forgotten. “Which means you’re safe too, baby. Unless Daddy was an inconsiderate wanker and brought home the wrong flu.” I bounced Hobbes a few times. “What do you think of that?” I asked him.

The baby said, “Ha-ha,” which would have sounded almost spiteful if it weren’t for the fact that he’d just discovered his reflection in the mirror and was not paying any attention to us at all.

I’ve got nothing germane to the situation to talk about here. The house is a mess and likely to stay one for the rest of the day, at least. I’ll work on fixing that tomorrow. Tomorrow, do you hear? Obama will be inaugurated and change will be coming to the U.S. I’ll be doing my small part to improve the country by picking my baby’s binky off the floor. I’m running out of time, too. Mom is flying in on Wednesday night and will be staying a few days, working as a guest teacher in town. The motivating factor here is obviously her grandson, but she’ll certainly have attention to spare for the state of my living room floor and the dust that has collected on top of the TV, not to mention all the other disgusting details I’m too embarrassed to share with you.

It’s 4:49 pm: the baby is still asleep, and the husband is silent. I’m going to take a few minutes off and pop some ibuprofen.

I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to get sick.

I was getting ready for work this morning, and the radio in the kitchen was — as usual — on NPR. They were interviewing a senator from California. I don’t recall the actual question, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear it. Regardless, I tuned in just as the interviewee said the following.

“…that Obama owes a lot to California, and we’re strongly represented in his government. We have a loud voice in the House of Representatives, we have the majority seat in the Senate, we’re on his–”

I stopped listening for a few seconds to eat a piece of chicken. I chewed a lot. Then I started paying attention again just as the interviewee said:

“–that over the next two years at least, the United States will be shaped a great deal by California’s values.”

“Hey,” I yelled out to the Guy in the living room. “Did you hear that?”

“About the US being shaped by California’s values?”

“California’s values.”

There was a short pause, and then the Guy appeared in the doorway, his hair rumpled and his face solemn. “I bet she said that just to mess with conservatives.”

I looked down, where Hobbes was staring up at me with wide, dark eyes from his bouncy seat. “California’s values,” I said again. “Somewhere out there, a million Bible-belters have just shat their pants.”

Hobbes said, “Oooooooooooo,” which just about sums it up, I think.

It turns out that my problem isn’t so much my inability to switch to English after two weeks of speaking primarily Japanese; it’s that after three months of spending 24 hours a day with a non-verbal, mostly non-expressive infant, I have lost the ability to communicate with functioning adults. “Functioning” is relative, given that I live and work in Silicon Valley, but my coworkers are above the average by any standard, even when compared against the non-nerd demographic of less myopic areas. They are kindly and socially adept, and I have returned from my leave and smashed into their midst like the periodic defecation of a passing airplane, a ball of frozen feces crash-landed in suburban America. What to make of this new Yuhri they do not know, but they smile with puzzled tolerance, pretend I have made a witticism instead of demonstrating reckless stupidity, and ask after my baby.

They continue to give me more credit than I am due, in short. By this point, they should know better than to expect great things from me, but they’ve gone and built up the pre-maternity leave me as some sort of messianic figure in their minds, capable of parting the Red Sea and incidentally turning water into wine.

“You have no idea how things fell apart while you were gone,” one of my coworkers told me, gripping his coffee with a vengeful fist. “It was awful.”

I pawed at my face. Just two seconds before that, I had said something so idiotic about his job, I was surprised he hadn’t decked me. He was apparently suffering from hair-trigger amnesia. “You people are insane,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said, as though I had made his point for him.

Two days after I came back to the office, I was talking to one of my colleagues and went into a long, rambling explanation about the racist Last Airbender Wonder Bread casting decisions and the Eurocentric exclusionary attitude prevalent in the media. “It’s like American media assumes that the only way that people can relate to a character is through a white man’s view,” I said. “It’s demeaning and,” I said, “and, and, and ….” And I almost said, Oh wait, you’re a white guy. Sorry about that. I’m not sure I mean you.

I managed to keep myself from saying it, mostly by just letting my mouth droop open a bit and letting my eyes glaze over. Fortunately, someone else wandered by and interrupted my monologue; I hovered for a few seconds, thinking about apologizing, then just faded tactfully out of the picture.

On top of my social inadequacies, I’ve picked up a conviction that three months out of circulation has made my judgment suspect. My social gaffes have reinforced this belief, so I’ve gone the last week and a half second-guessing all of my instinctive decisions. Unfortunately, while my social skills have regressed to where they were in 3rd grade, when I told my teacher, Mr. Peterson, that World War II happened because of US envy over Japan’s peat moss supply, my project management instincts are actually sound. It’s my second-guessing that’s crap.

Most of the last week and a half have been punctuated by things like this.

Me: I think thing X would be a good idea, but I don’t know what I’m talking about so I’ll play it safe and do thing Y.

Later…

Coworker A: This thing Y you did? I don’t think it’s such a good idea.

Me: Um.

Coworker A: I think maybe we should do thing X.

Coworker B: Yeah, that’s a good idea. We should do thing X.

Coworker A: I don’t mean to step on your toes or anything. Are you okay?

Me: Why?

Coworker A: You’re making a face. And now you’re hitting yourself in the head with your laptop.

Me: Never mind.

One would think that after the fourth or fifth time this happened, I would learn — but I seem to have an instinct for sandwiching intelligence with nitwittery. Every time I do a second-guess act I later regret, I follow it up with a spasm of foot-in-mouth so severe I can taste the cheap cotton of my tube socks. It’s like a serving of street mime followed by a chaser of sad-faced clown. My decisions to follow my instincts are shot down by justifiable fits of insecurity about my IQ, returning us to ground state again.

And yet, my coworkers continue to treat me with sympathetic awe, as though I were some rare and exotic beast returned to the wild after decades of well-publicized extinction.

“Thank God,” one of my coworkers said, clutching his head when he saw me in the kitchen for the first time. “Are you back? Please say you’re back. Are you back?”

I said, “Yes. I am the Resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies.” …Except no, I didn’t actually say that.

Missed opportunities.

I left early today to go to the dentist.

Have I written about my new dentist? I’m not sure that I have. Hold on for a second while I do a search….

…wow, I’ve done a lot of entries about teeth.

Oh good God, there’s the poopy mouth story. Sad to say, this is not the most horrible story my sister has ever sent me about things she has done. Unfortunately, the one that actually made me bury my head under the sofa is not one that is publishable, on the grounds that someday she might want to get a job in a world where public discussion about Onan’s sin is not the norm.

This is not the topic at hand, though. Where were we? We were talking about my dentist.

Right.

I’m not entirely sure he’s a good dentist. I mean, it’s possible he is, but really, how would I know? At the end of my life, say, I could look back and count the number of teeth I had and go, Wow, I have most of them. I got me some damn good care! but in the interim, it’s more about: A) are my teeth falling out? and B) if they fall out, is it because of some childhood trauma wherein my sister bashed me in the face with a rock, or is it because they have rotted from the inside-out and are only clinging to my gums by the barest thread of dead nerve?

Like I said, it’s one of those things where prevention is the point. You can’t exactly point back and say, Aha. There. See how that tooth’s missing a cavity? That cavity came wandering around the ‘hood looking for turf, and we showed it the 411. We fucked that cavity’s shit up but good. You have to go by more qualitative measures. (Segue: Do I mean qualitative? Or quantitative? I think I mean qualitative. One of those means there’s empirical evidence; the other means it’s more subjective. Wait, I think I mean quantitative. Crap.)

My dentist seems like a nice enough guy, though we don’t exactly converse and I’ve never actually seen him smile. If there was a word to describe him, I’d pick young. The second word I’d pick is awkward.

He doesn’t have any hygienists working for him, so he does all the teeth cleaning himself. You can see how the combination of those two adjectives would lend itself to doubts on the part of the patient.

I explained as much to a coworker this evening, who was coincidentally on his way out to an appointment with his own dentist.

“Are you looking for a new dentist?” he asked.

“The thing is, I don’t think his business is going very well,” I told him. “I’d feel bad if I left.”

“You’re going to take one for the team, huh?”

“His receptionist is really cool.” It sounded a bit lame, even to me.

He looked after me and grinned. I’ve been on the receiving end of that grin before; it’s a reality check grin, the kind that says, You are really dumb — but in a nice way. He has beautiful teeth.

“I should maybe reconsider my health care strategy,” I said.

“It seems to be working out for you.”

“I’ll wait until his business picks up,” I decided. “Then I’ll find a better dentist.”

My coworker laughed and headed out. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing; if I’d stayed on the subject much longer, I might have ended up telling him about Sako’s poopy tooth, and that’s one of those stories that would color our future interactions forever. Brown.

It turns out I meant qualitative. There’s a lesson in that. Always trust your first instincts.

Also, after typing a word like ‘qualitative’ a few times, it starts to look really weird and wrong.

Like ‘cat.’

There’s something wrong with the word ‘cat.’

A lazy Sunday it was not, though we had enough down time that I don’t feel completely shredded. A lot of the errands I meant to take care of got taken care of; some long-standing chores got done, leaving me with a satisfying feeling of having accomplished something.

It was nice to hang out with Hobbes for two whole days. He warmed up to me again; by Sunday morning, he was giving me that radiant little smile he used to. Hi! It’s infectious, especially since he’s full of joy when he’s just woken up. Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hello! How are you? Hi! He flailed wildly on our bed, hurling his arms and legs every which way. Hurray!

A dark, cynical part of me feels that it simply isn’t normal for anybody, even a 3 month old — who is, after all, so utterly ignorant he considers drool a perfectly valid communication tool — to feel quite so happy about waking up to my face every morning. There’s something not quite right about the child. Still, he was willing to be adoring, so I was willing to be adored, for the weekend at least….

…and then of course I took him into daycare this morning. He let me go with a burning look of reproach. Et tu, Brute? was the gist, though I’m pretty sure he was thinking the baby approximation of fruitier verbiage.

I am supposed to be doing something that I committed myself to doing, which of course means that I don’t feel like doing it anymore. Procrastination is a fine art. I have mastered it.

Bugger.

Every morning, Hobbes wakes up and greets me with a beautiful smile. He’s been doing this since he learned that he could use his mouth as more than a nipple-latch mechanism. Hi, old woman! he’s saying. I remember you! You own the boobs! I like you!

Up until this past week, that is.

Over the course of the last five days, that morning smile has gotten smaller and smaller until this morning he woke up and stared moodily at me. No smile. Oh. It’s you again, his expression said. Great. We get to go through this again? Really? And then — and I couldn’t help but take this a little personally — he threw up a little in his mouth.

I think it would be reasonable to say that he is not taking his relegation to daycare well, thrilled though the caregivers seem to be to see him every day. The adjustment period hasn’t been bad except in the way that he is cranky about the whole thing; he starts out the day in a good mood, which lasts until it’s about time to go to the daycare. By the time we reach the facility, he usually has his head shoved under my chin and is busily sucking on any part of me that he can reach.

If I wasn’t aware that it’s simply a matter of timing — he’s capable of staying awake maybe two hours at a time before crashing, and it’s just about two hours between his morning wake-up and his arrival at the daycare — I would suspect the nice ladies at the daycare were dressing him up like a poodle and pinching his cheeks during his stay. Excited though they are to see him at the daycare, his last look at me is usually uncommonly doleful. There’s nothing like that little stab of guilt that will carry me through the rest of my day.

My first week back was a little disconcerting. Grown-up work. Grown-up thoughts. I’m out of practice dealing with people whose brains have developed past the instinct to eat one’s own pants.

It didn’t help that I spent the two weeks in Seattle speaking mostly Japanese. English was remarkably difficult; I floundered through the shoals of grammar like a three-legged mongoose in a jello mold. I had a hard time not breaking into baby talk at completely inappropriate moments.

After a while, talking like a verbally defective kid’s show turns into a habit. It’s only a matter of time before I address the founder as, “Who’s a cute widdow woogums?”

I have no idea what would happen after that. Part of me really wants to know.

I’ve always had a problem with self-control.

I’m a little astounded by how tired I am. And it’s only 9:29 pm.

Yet another notch in my ongoing bedpost tally of decrepitude. In my own defense, I have poor sleep habits so exhaustion at this hour of the day makes perfect sense.

“In my own defense.” I probably should have picked a different phrase. Now I’ll lack any credibility if I try to claim sympathy for my fatigue.

Right.

Moving on.

Hobbes continues to be less than thrilled about daycare, but he’s plenty eager to talk about it when I get home. The Guy picks him up around 5:45; I get home about an hour later, so he’s recovered from the trauma of the day’s events by the time I see him. “Aaaaaah,” he told me very seriously when I greeted him this evening. “Ooof, urp, aba brrrrrrrrp.”

Since I’d been having an ESL day at work anyway, this made perfect sense to me.

Ludicrous though it seems, he gets a report card from day care. Competition means nothing until you’ve been an Asian kid in Silicon Valley — but it’s not that kind of report card, fortunately. Not that he doesn’t already get pressured in other areas, but being scored on your drooling skills seems a bit excessive to me, even if some of the other parents I’ve seen coming through the day care facility have been visibly comparing my kid to theirs. What goes through a parent’s mind when their kid is that age? Crap. Her kid already has hair and mine is bald as a walnut. We’ll have to pick up some Rogaine this weekend.

No, the report card that Hobbes get basically gives me a rundown on his day: when he ate; when he slept; when he woke up; when his diaper was changed. It is the summary of a life of thrills and excitement, let me tell you. For instance. This is his schedule from today:

9:25 – arrive.
10:00 – diaper change
10:15 – bottle
10:30 – sleep
11:20 – wake up
12:00 – diaper change
12:40 – sleep
2:35 – wake up
2:40 – bottle
2:45 – diaper change
3:45 – sleep
4:20 – wake up
4:45 – diaper change
5:00 – bottle
5:40 – leave

Bet that narrative had you on the edge of your seat, didn’t it? I know I was glued to the screen, waiting to see what happened next.

Laid out like this, it’s hard to miss the fact that babies get to live really good lives. In between, during the conscious hours, there was probably a lot of staring at colorful things and mirrors and listening to caregivers sing songs about bus wheels going ’round and ’round. Dinner and a show, and they even take care of your body functions. There is a certain lack of dignity about it, true, but on the other hand, you don’t have to pay a mortgage, go to work, or even figure out what you want to wear in the morning. You’re a baby. Nobody cares. The only life as free from care is that of the software programmer, who likewise doesn’t bother figuring out what to wear in the morning for the exact same reason, but still has to file W-2s and (occasionally) go to work.

Reading through his full schedule myself, one thing leaps out at me since I’m familiar with the way Hobbes’s — let’s say mind, for lack of a better word — works. He hates the bottle. The kind ladies at the daycare have been patient with him to an excessive degree, but he continues to do whatever he can to avoid it. If that means starving, so be it — but he’s come up with alternative methods of getting out of the situation, having grown accustomed to the Guy’s tendency to force feed him if he proves too recalcitrant.

The Guy and Hobbes have equal levels of sheer bloody-mindedness built into their personalities. The Guy, being bigger and older, has aged his like a fine cheese. Hobbes is still outmatched in this respect.

The first time the daycare tried to feed him, he promptly fell asleep instead. The second time, he immediately needed a diaper change. His method of making a diaper change necessary was probably quite loud and fragrant, if I know my child. When the Guy came to pick him up, the last bottle was pretty much full. He brought Hobbes home and fed him the bottle — “He was starving,” the Guy told me. “He latched on and wouldn’t let go.” — after which monumental effort Hobbes promptly puked up the entire thing.

“Abbaaaa,” he told me proudly, when I picked him up. He waved his arms wildly. This much, Mom. I threw up all over. “Goo.”

Motherhood does something to your brain. I swear to God, all the stuff I just wrote was actually interesting to me.

Maybe I need to sleep.