faulty vision

I am cranky.

To be specific, I’m watching American Idol at the moment, an experience that is topping off my beaker of hatred towards the entire human race. There’s some sort of revolting duet taking place between out-of-tune warbling lizard guy and nasally undulating floppy chick in blue. The longer it goes on, the more I want to reach through the television and rip the larynx out of both of their throats.

The announcer is informing me that one of them is mumblemumblemumble, while the other is apparently “Smoky Robinson.” I have no idea if that’s meant to be the man or the woman. I am filled with indifferent rage.

The rational thing to do is to turn the television off, and if I were, say, a rational person in a rational mood, that’s exactly what I’d do. As it happens, that is not what I am. At this particular, isolated point in time, I happen to be in one of those rare moods that make it possible for me to not only enjoy being cranky, but actually revel in it. This is the kind of mood that the Red Queen is in all the time, and it’s astonishingly liberating to be able to wallow in a misanthropy the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I was in high school. If I had my druthers, I’d be out in the backyard pounding the crap out of a garbage can with a baseball bat and hollering imprecations about my fellow man.

There is a lesson in there somewhere about freedom from the restraining influences of civilization and all that — the importance of letting your inner beast out now and then to romp about and be savage — but I’m lolled in my bed watching American Idol over the wireless, an episode I recorded using an open-source Tivo program, and fast forwarding through commercials so I can find just that much more to rage over.

I rather doubt I have any credibility in the ’slip free of the restraints of civilization’ arena.

Excuse me. Must run. I forgot my martini in the kitchen.

Gratuitous photo post, but really — and I say this as the most unbiased of mothers, obviously — if you had pictures of this adorable baby, wouldn’t you post them too?

Hobbes had his 6 month visit to the pediatrician today, an event that he didn’t particularly care for. True, he was allowed to spend a good percentage of that visit completely naked–for those of you who are curious, there were no unfortunate liquid “accidents,” in a stark (hah) departure from previous medical engagements–but on the other hand, he was subjected to three vaccinations, all of which used needles that were, I swear to God, larger than the ones that are used to draw blood. One of them was about the length of my pinky, which on a scrawny little bug like my son meant that it was probably hitting bone when it went in.

He was so pissed off he literally stopped breathing for a while. You could have stopped traffic with the color of his face. There are times when it pays to have a goldfish’s memory span.

As of today he weighs in at 26 inches and 13 lbs 15 ozs, which puts him at 35% for height and 3% for weight.

“That’s according to Caucasian growth charts though,” the doctor told me. (Well, she told us, but one of us was busy trying to eat his foot, so really the only person relevant to this conversation was me.) “By Asian standards his height’s about average.”

“Right,” I said. “By Asian standards.”

It’s one of those truisms of medicine that everybody’s the same, but nobody’s alike. The growth charts for children in America are based on North American standards by the National Center for Health Statistics, using numbers culled from the general population. This works just fine if you’re, say, not a hereditary shrimp like those of most Asian backgrounds; unfortunately, if you happen to be one of those unfortunate buggers, you’re doomed to disappoint your parents from the get-go by being low on the percentile scale. Parents of infants are often asked, “What percentile is he?” as the first step in a lifetime of value determined by statistical measurement. I inevitably follow up my answer to that question with a determined treatise on the origin and ethnic inaccuracy of growth charts, with an explanation that if I had a growth chart from Hong Kong, say, he would be dandy.

“As long as he’s healthy, right?” my hapless auditor will almost invariably say, in a feeble attempt to turn the tide unleashed by the innocuous question.

And I say, “Well, sure,” because of course as long as he’s healthy–but I am competitive, something that I suspect is built into the genetic code of all Asians–and if he’s ranked low on any scale, I will damn well tell you why.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him on the way back to the car. “Napoleon was a shrimp, too. And look how far he got.”

Hobbes, of course, couldn’t give a damn. He’s just thrilled he gets to start using a sippy cup starting tomorrow.

I was sick today.

Again.

It occurs to me, thinking back to the fog-shrouded distance of my youth, that my mother was never ill. She was sick maybe once with the flu, as I recall–a momentous occasion in our household, tantamount to gravity taking a holiday until further notice–and then there was that whole thing with the cancer which we never knew about until our twenties, so that hardly counts. The kinds of germs that could make it through Mom’s protective armor were the kind that they make military-grade biological weapons from, so needless to say, she tended to be just fine while the rest of us rolled about in our beds, groaning with misery.

Thinking back over the last six months since Hobbes was born, I can count a total of maybe three? Four? times that I’ve been out sick from work, whereas Hobbes himself has had only the occasional low-grade fever, which has never (insofar as I have noticed) impacted his ability to enjoy himself with a piece of plastic and a mouthful of fingers.

“He’s bringing stuff home from day care,” one of my friends told me wisely, “so you might as well get used to it. For the first two years, it’s non-stop.”

Which isn’t exactly what you’d call comforting, nor does it in any way explain why he gets off scot-free, while I tip over like the French military the second any microbe more malicious than algae heaves into my line of sight.

“He’s probably still using your immune system,” another friend told me. “Are you breastfeeding?”

Which still doesn’t explain anything. Unless my immune system likes Hobbes better than it likes me, so is spending all of its energy defending him and just calling it in when I need it. Not that I would put anything past the extremely decrepit duct-tape patchwork that passes for my immune system these days. I would be embittered, say, but not surprised.

Fortunately, the fever that hit me hard last night (and again this afternoon) appears to have run its course. The obvious treatment was equal parts sleep, sweating, liquids, and ibuprofen. All of those things were within my reach, so I didn’t stint myself; as of 5 pm, when the Guy came back home with Hobbes, I was well enough to be mobile, and my headache had retreated far enough that I was no longer photosensitive. I’d even vacuumed the living room, out of some moody thought that it would be a good idea if I got something done before Child Protective Services dropped by, discovered I was a terrible housekeeper and could therefore not be entrusted with an infant.

(Logic leap. Just go with it. Illness is not conducive to rational thought.)

One of my coworkers told me, before I had the baby, that boys were wonderful. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world to them, no matter what,” she said. “Until their first girlfriend, anyway.”

Hobbes greeted me at the door with a beatific smile, an expression that my actual bedraggled appearance in no way justified. I think he’s privately mocking me, to be honest. His expression of deeply seated smugness as I took him off his father had no obvious cause that I could identify.

“He likes you better,” the Guy said.

“He won’t like me better when I take him to his doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning.”

“Uh oh,” said Hobbes.

His six month checkup is tomorrow, at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM. So it goes. Since I am now ambulatory and arguably functional, I’ll be taking him. In preparation, I have restocked the diaper bag with extra diapers. Something about the doctor’s office agitates him excessively–it may be the shots–and so far the clinicians haven’t managed to get away without at least one disaster or another.

Let’s just say there’s a reason they wear lab coats and leave it at that.

We’re terrible parents. Seriously.

Terrible.

I have the attention span of a gnat.

“Well, wait,” you’re thinking. “Gnats are persistent. They hang around. They pop into your line of sight just long enough for you to realize they’re there, and then they spend the rest of their lives dive-bombing your left eyeball and working up the nerve to ask you out to the senior class prom, just hovering, buzz buzz buzz, in giant lopsided circles just within your peripheral vision.”

To which I say, “Yes, but see, the rest of their lives is short, which means that they run out of attention, which means they drop down dead and all in all their attention spans, collectively speaking, are insignificant to the extreme.”

And then you say, “Right. I get you. Carry on.”

So.

Crap. I forget what I was going to talk about.

***

My mother, first-time grandmother, my mother the woman who is going to die soon so she can’t help me take care of my children when they are born, the “you should let him cry sometimes or else his lungs won’t develop — what’s wrong with him? Is he hurt? It’s been five minutes. Should he be crying this long? Aren’t you going to go to him?” grandmother, my mother, is concerned about the hair.

To be specific, she is concerned about the hair that Hobbes is losing on his head. The hair on either side of his head, which has been rubbing off because he sleeps — get this — with his head to one side. It rubs off onto the sheets, so what I have in my arms during half the morning is a little boy with a mohawk, which is very trendy in some parts of the world (and some parts of the 20th century, though he probably wouldn’t care all that much about that.)

“What does the doctor say?” she asked me over Skype. She was quite anxious about it.

This is a woman who decided health insurance was a pointless exercise and went without for over twenty years. Who thinks illness is an opportunity to rid your body of toxins, and exhorts her children to practice, “Kansha! Kansha!” Gratitude! Gratitude! when we have the flu. Who didn’t care much for her last doctor because he wanted her to actually take the medication he was prescribing for her, as opposed to just telling him that she would and not ever bother to pick it up at the pharmacy.

“I’m not going to the doctor because my baby’s going bald,” I told her. “It happens to most babi– you told me that it would happen. When he was born, you said, ‘He has so much hair,’ and ‘it falls out.’”

She looked deeply skeptical. Like her daughter, she is gifted with the magical ability to rewrite history on the fly. “I did?” she said, and then: “It does not look healthy. When do you go to the doctor?”

“A couple of weeks.”

She shook her head with obvious concern.

Hobbes, who had been patiently gnawing on my wrist for the last few minutes, abruptly lost interest in the conversation and smashed his head against my chin. He squawked.

My mother’s eyes narrowed with immediate anxiety. “Is he sick?” she asked. “Maybe you should take him to the doctor.” She visibly yearned to reach through the computer screen and snatch Hobbes away for a visit to the friendly neighborhood pediatrician. “How many weeks?”

“Bye, Mom. Say bye-bye to your grandmother, Hobbes.”

Hobbes growled.

***

I still don’t remember what I was going to talk about. Well … crap.

I suppose it wasn’t that important.

Warning: grossness ahead.

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Hobbes was sick for most of the weekend, a fact that didn’t seem to impair his enjoyment of life particularly. At 3 AM Sunday morning, he threw up the entire contents of his stomach, necessitating a complete change of clothing for both him and me, and a shower that, I admit frankly, I was too exhausted to take at the time. Fortunately his diet is still mostly milk-based, which kept it from plumbing the depths of grossness that would otherwise have been available to us.

You could say that the first upchuck was my fault. We don’t tend to burp him all that often, so when we do — when he fusses enough that we use that as an option — we aren’t very skilled in how we go about doing it. In this case, it was early morning, I had just fed him a bottle, and I was exhausted and wanting to go back to bed, so I went about the business by sitting him up and leaning him forward, then whacking him hard on the back several times. He regarded his feet with thoughtful interest, and belched loudly.

“Good boy,” I said, and whacked a few times more, just to … I don’t know. Congratulate him, maybe?

At that point, puking up his guts was practically foreordained.

When the disaster was done, I sat listening to the quiet splat! splat! of milk dripping onto the sodden floor while Hobbes sniffled to himself. Any thought of sleep was dead and gone; my flannel pajamas were practically designed to soak up any moisture that came their way and transfer it in a perfectly friendly fashion to any skin or underclothing that might be nearby. There was a strong smell of bile.

“Thanks,” I said.

He turned his head, caught my eye, and smiled engagingly. Don’t mention it, he seemed to be saying, except in a particularly loopy way that would require a great many exclamation points to convey adequately. Don’t mention it!!!!! He’s a funny little thing.

It was the start of a tiring 36 hours. He continued off and on sick throughout all of Sunday, with a fever that might or might not have been paranoia on the part of his parents. Certainly he was not in a spectacular mood, although his ongoing ability to look like a sparrow hopped up on E a few seconds after every upchuck baffled me. By rights he should have been miserable, but the opposite seemed to be the case. I attribute his inexplicable delight to the versatile and ephemeral baby memory.

In the main, Hobbes is a charming and unrepentant flirt; anyone who manages to catch his attention and make direct eye contact with him will invariably receive a delighted smile, followed by a game of hide-and-seek when he buries his face in his parent’s shoulder. Unlike his parents, he is aggressively nonjudgmental of his fellow man, and his fellow man reacts about as you would expect when blasted by the uncritical approval of an infant.

This bonhomie fades when he is tired, of course. Or when he is sick, we discovered this weekend. Only once before have I seen it disappear completely. A couple of weeks ago we were in Nijiya, a local Japanese market, when I noticed that the Guy had wandered to investigate a bulletin board posted with various local requests — in Japanese, so I don’t understand the interest on his part. Perhaps it was the pictures? Hobbes was on his shoulder, and patently uninterested in the stuff his father was interested in.

Another gentleman wandered over to check out the bulletin board. For a short while, all three stood there, staring at notices. Then Hobbes swiveled his bulbous head and discovered the newcomer.

He stared.

What followed was a fascinating demonstration of social usage. Finding himself in the eye-line of an infant, the man smiled at Hobbes.

Who stared.

The man made a face and winked at Hobbes.

Who stared.

After a few attempts to engage the baby, the man gave up. He turned his attention back to the bulletin board, away from Hobbes.

Who stared.

I’ve noticed from time to time that Hobbes does not blink as often as I do. Whether babies are not as sensitive to things in their eyes, or whether they have no significant issues with dryness–I don’t know. Regardless, after a little while, the man’s neck started to turn red. No doubt he was aware of the baby’s interest; regardless, he didn’t turn to look at Hobbes.

Who stared.

A few seconds later, the man sidled away, perhaps attempting to break the immediate eyeline between himself and Hobbes. He moved to the side. Then he moved back. Hobbes turned his head to follow him.

And stared.

A very uncomfortable minute later, the man strolled nonchalantly away, his shoulders up around his ears.

Hobbes watched him go.

Flighty though his attention span can be, he is capable of complete and absolute focus on a single person or object. It is a nonjudgmental focus, true, but it is still a spotlight of sorts. Unleavened by a smile or even a blink, it is an unnerving thing to be on the receiving end of.

I meander a bit. Anyway, Hobbes was sick. He’s better now.

My house stinks of baby puke.

“Well, look at that,” an engineer drawled, walking into my meeting.

My other colleague laughed and ran a hand over his head. I looked at him, puzzled.

“Oh,” I realized belatedly. “You’ve got hair.” Normally A.’s head is shaved down to the scalp. It’s a popular hairstyle at my company. The last few days I’d vaguely noticed some dark fuzz where usually there was light reflecting off his head; now there was a dark, curly growth of about half a centimeter’s thickness covering it.

“Yeah. It’s the first time I’ve grown it this long,” he said. “I usually have it shaved, but once in a while I just grow it out to check if I have any bald spots, any grey–”

“Any hair,” interjected the engineer.

“That too.”

“It looks good to me,” I said, inspecting his head critically. “It–” The two men grinned at me. “Oh,” I said. “You’re making a joke.”

There are times when I feel limited by my cultural inhibitions.

“The Japanese don’t do humor,” I told them.

I’ve gone through our bookshelves multiple times in the last two years, and have been ruthless about culling — the libraries in our area have done well by us — but the end result has been a collection that is, admittedly, still larger than it ought to be. The books that are left are keepers, and have stood the test of reread and criticism. True, we still have three copies of The Hobbit floating around, but I don’t know where two of them are, so I consider this a win in the grand scheme of things.

Last month, I found one of my paperback books in the bathroom garbage, which is not one of our approved shelving locations. I fished it out with some dismay and discovered that it had the telltale crinkling of a book that has come into contact with moisture. Still, you know, garbage. I puzzled over it, but I was in a hurry so I didn’t give it too much thought. The appropriate thing in this case would have been to check with the Guy to find out if he’d (1) done something to damage the book; and (2) thrown it away. I didn’t bother with that. I also didn’t bother with putting the book back on one of the bookshelves, for which I blame the aforementioned hurry that I was in.

I tossed it onto the closest available surface, which was on top of the toilet tank, and went off on my merry way.

A couple of days later, having cause to toss something out, I popped open the bathroom garbage and found the book in there again. Once more, I was in a hurry; once more, I flipped the book out and left it on the toilet tank. Once more I forgot all about it and didn’t bother asking the Guy.

A few days later, I found it in the garbage again.

It’s funny, the things you can be stubborn about. From this point on, I really have no excuse. The simplest course of action would have been to just ask. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have ample opportunity, or that it posed that much of an effort. Six words, tops. “Why’s that book in the garbage?” For whatever reason, I just didn’t. I occasionally get into these idiotic moods, where repeating the same action over and over again is more satisfying than preempting the need to do so. It’s like lowest common denominator curiosity to see what will happen next, even if “what happens next” turns out to be exactly the same thing as the last seven times.

The definition of insanity’s not that far wrong. You can probably see where this is going. This went on for two weeks. Book in garbage, book on toilet. Book in garbage, book in toilet. In fact, if it had been up to me, the whole, stupid cycle would have continued indefinitely until it took on the quality of family tradition, passed on through the generations. Unfortunately, the Guy has more sense.

We were lying in bed, reading one night, when he finally did something. “Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“You know that book in the garbage?”

It wasn’t in the garbage anymore; I’d just taken it out while brushing my teeth. “Yeah?”

“I dropped it in the toilet. That’s why it’s in the garbage.”

My first thought was, deliberately dropped it in the toilet? but the Guy would have been perfectly forthcoming with that detail if that had been how it had gone down. I climbed out of bed, padded to the bathroom, knocked the book into the garbage, and came back to bed.

He turned a page of his book. “Just in case you were wondering,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Every married couple has their own communication style. Ours just happens to be more … iterative than most.

I recently subscribed to the New Scientist RSS feed to give my morning routine an extra bit of perk. It’s been a while since I subscribed to the actual magazine, and not that long ago that I stopped renewing. At the time, I was getting more material than I had time to read, which left me with the typical liberal guilt at the stacks of reconstituted trees piling up beside the sofa–not to mention the outraged housewife in me, which disliked the mess.

The online feed is much more manageable, though there is plenty of clutter now in my reader. That I can live with. New Scientist is an enjoyable read, full of interesting ideas and developments written in an easily accessible style; the free version gives me all I could want, which leads me to believe I’ll eventually pay for the service. You can get something for nothing if you want, but if there’s enough nothing for something, eventually something will go away and you’ll end up with nothing for nothing. Or to put it more succinctly: good content is worth paying for.

And just look at the content. How can you not love a site that gives you an article titled, in all seriousness, “Fart molecule could be next Viagra?”

• Fart molecule could be next Viagra
  
• Hair blindness in humans
  
• Thumbs up for 3D bone printer
  
• The science of Watchmen

CSI: NY was on the TV. The Guy was watching it. I had better things to do.

“Interesting,” I said, from the middle of a New Scientist article about the first use of anaesthesiology. “According to this, the first use of anesthetic was by a Japanese person to remove a–”

“I can believe that,” the Guy said, his attention on the show. “Japanese people are pretty–”

“–cancerous breast in the 1800s.”

“–boring. They can put anyone to sleep.”

I looked over. The Guy was grinning smugly to himself, his gaze still fixed firmly on the TV.

His head made a very satisfactory thunk! when I hit it.

We got a high chair from our friends Tim and Amanda, whose two daughters have grown up enough not to need a high chair.

My inquisitive spawn, it transpires, is too small to fit into it. Not for want of trying, though.

“I don’t think he fits,” the Guy said meditatively.

“You think?”

“Awww,” I said. “Who’s a cute baby?”

In the ensuing silence, I heard a quiet ‘kuba kuba kuba’ sound as he gummed the edge of the tray with a vengeance. It sounded like the child was trying to gnaw its way through the plastic.

“Wait. What are you doing? Stop that.”

“Bad,” I scolded. “We do not eat furniture.”

He burped and started shoving bits of himself in his mouth instead.

Well. It was an improvement, anyway.

Food poisoning is the excuse du jour — for the week at least, if not for the fact that I haven’t actually updated in–

Right. So I had food poisoning.

I recovered pretty quickly, all things considered. I’m still unclear on what caused the gastrointestinal excitement, but just to be sure I’ve knocked everything I ate off of my permanent menu. Admittedly, some of those permanent strike-throughs will probably be up for renegotiation at a later date: Peet’s coffee, for instance. True, my gorge rises right now at the idea of indulging in another one of their non-fat, decaff, sugarless mochas, but it’s early days yet. Come Monday morning, when I’m exhausted from a weekend of extensive relaxation and playing-with-the-baby, I’ll probably rethink it — and after all, how does one get food poisoning from coffee, anyhow?

Apropos, I’ve decided to call that particular drink an ‘emasculated’ mocha, and am now entranced by the notion of walking into Peet’s and requesting it. My inquiring mind wants to know how the barrista will take it. $5 says he’ll say, “What?” and then translate it perfectly after a second’s thought. It’s a sadly colloquial world we live in.

Incidentally, I’ve been working on writing more, which is in no way reflected by my recent history of posting. Joining a writing group appears to have done — let’s be honest here — absolutely nothing for my actual output, though it has done a lot to make me more critical of what I read. Not the outcome I’d hoped for, but we live, we learn, we decide instead to exert pressure on other, more talented people so that someday they will list one’s name in the acknowledgment page of their newly published award-winning novel….

I continue to find it easier to imagine having written a spectacular work of fiction than to actually write said work of fiction. Imagine that.

“I LAY EGGS OF gold,” said the chicken in a strangled voice.

The cook, who was preparing to dispense the final punctuation mark to the chicken’s life, paused. “Say what, then?”

“Gold,” said the chicken, and rolled the eye that was not squashed against the flat chopping block. “My eggs.”

“Bollocks,” said the cook, but she lowered her arm, her knife momentarily forgotten.

“I assure you that it’s quite true,” said the chicken and, feeling the fingers around its neck relax, flailed mightily. The cook tightened her grip. “Madam,” the chicken squawked. “I protest–”

“Prove it,” said the cook, lifting her chopper once more. “Eggs, aye?”

“You can hardly expect me to produce an egg under this kind of stress,” the chicken wheezed. “Egg-laying is a meditative exercise, an expression of emotional harmony — a koan of the soul, if you will. Imminent death is not conducive to contemplation of the infinite.”

The cook, who was not noticeably spiritual, said, “Where’s this infinite?”

“Perhaps the barn,” said the chicken, and added a throttled whine as it was lifted by the neck and borne off to the barn across the courtyard. Inside, the scent of hay and the mild gaze of an ancient bull greeted their arrival.

“Go’an, then,” said the cook, and planted the chicken atop one of the hen boxes, where it rolled its eyes again. The bull, interested, plodded over to investigate.

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?” he asked. He had a ponderous way of speaking.

“Go away,” said the chicken. “You are a distraction, sir.”

“Whyyyyyyyyyyy?” asked the bull.

“Eggs,” said the chicken, and fluffed its feathers. “Laying gold eggs. Life and death. Must concentrate.”

The bull considered this. “Buuuuuut,” he said at last, sounding puzzled. “Yooooooouuuu aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrre aaaaaaaa–”

“Concentrating!” the chicken shrieked. “Shut up!”

The bull looked wounded and fell silent.

“Just give me a moment,” the chicken told the cook, and strained.

There was a long pause.

“Well?” the cook asked.

“Odd,” said the chicken. “This didn’t look so difficult when the goose did it.”

THE COOK’S ASSISTANT, WHO had spent an hour chopping onions and carrots, glanced up as her superior returned, covered in feathers. “Done, then?”

“Chickens,” the cook said scornfully, and tossed the plucked bird into the sink. It landed with a sad thump. “Think a body don’t know the difference between a rooster and a hen. The things don’t half talk, though, do they?”

—

Idiom: ‘cock and bull story’ – a lie someone tells that is completely unbelievable.