faulty vision

I was getting Hobbes’s bottles for daycare ready in the kitchen when I heard the Guy in the living room, engaged in earnest discussion with the baby.

“No, you don’t want to read that. That’s a girl book. That’s for girls.”

…which puzzled me.

“What book?” I called over.

“A Hat Full of Sky,” he answered, a Terry Pratchett book that he had just finished reading and, let us make no mistake about this, enjoyed.

I sputtered a little. “How is that a girl book?”

“It’s Young Adult,” he said, because he is an idiot.

“What? What does ‘Young Adult’ have to do with–”

“And it’s about a girl,” he said in that insufferably reasonable tone he uses when he knows he’s being a jackass. “It’s meant to make girls feel better about themselves.”

I frothed. “That’s stupid. That’s like saying all books written about boys are for boys because they make boys feel good about themselves.”

“That’s right,” he said. “No, don’t touch that, son.”

I banged around stuff in the sink. “AND,” I hollered, still on the trail of stupidity run amok in the household, “AND, that all books involving white people are for white people because they make white people feel good.”

“No, that doesn’t follow,” he said. He had that … note in his voice he gets when he’s very proud of himself for some exceptionally specious piece of reasoning. “Because colored people can get to see how messed up white people are, so they get to feel better about themselves, too.”

And then he started cracking up, which is, to be frank, the perfect description for his brain.

“How do you think I’d look with dreads?” I asked, watching a woman cross our path in the parking lot at Target.

“Oh, you’d look great,” the Guy said.

“Shut up.”

“I’m being supportive.”

I eyed him suspiciously. He kept his eyes on the road. “Right,” I said.

“They’d make your head look big,” he added.

“Thanks.”

“Huge.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“Like a cabbage,” he said. “Or a cauliflower.”

I gritted my teeth.

“Or a lettuce,” he continued happily.

He and I, we have different definitions for the word ’supportive.’

Mom came to visit a couple of weeks ago on her way through town. There isn’t much to say about it, but as they say, picture’s worth a thousand words….

“I was having this discussion at work today,” I mentioned to the Guy one night, “where we were talking about my new haircut, and I told (name redacted) that (so-and-so) had said it made me look like a boy. And I said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and so-and-so said, ‘I didn’t say it looked bad. I just said it makes you look like a boy.’ Which, if you think about it, isn’t that sort of implied when you tell a girl that her new haircut makes her look like the wrong gender?”

The Guy eyed my head critically and opened his mouth. I hurried on.

“And (name redacted) said, you should have heard what so-and-so said to me when I told him–”

The Guy said something. I talked louder. There was a brief moment of chaos where I plowed on with my story and he said something that was obviously not as important as my narrative, until he finally gave up and shut up, and I continued in triumph.

“–this friend of her son has Asperger’s, and she says it has this weird effect where the boy has to be right. Absolutely has to. And if he isn’t right and he realizes that other people are going to argue him out of being right, he will make stuff up in order to be right.”

“Hm,” said the Guy.

“And I told her that that’s not an Asperger’s thing, that’s a male thing. And all the women in the room agreed with me,” I finished smugly.

“Hm,” said the Guy.

I poked him. “Don’t deny it. You make stuff up all the time.”

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

“Only when I have to,” he said. And then screamed like a little girl when he saw my face and dove under the covers.

Mom, who came back to visit on her way from Santa Rosa to the San Jose airport this past weekend, was watching Hobbes try to eat a remote control. We keep several remote controls around the house purely for this purpose. They’re expensive toys, but he rejects Playskool and Lego in favor of Sony and Panasonic. What can you do?

At some point in the process of electronic consumption, Hobbes decided to hurl it across the room. He has a good arm for a 9-month old. It flew quite far. Thunk.

“Hmm,” said Mom.

“Hobbes, don’t do that,” I said, and fetched it back.

It immediately flew across the room again. Thunk. Hobbes watched it thoughtfully for a while to see if it would come back. It did not. He went after it.

“He’s quite strong,” said Mom. Proudly. Worriedly. She backed away a little and watched him take a second crack at eating the remote.

Thunk.

“Hobbes.”

“You have to be careful,” Mom said, while Hobbes pursued the remote across the room once more. “You know, when Brian was a baby–”

“My cousin Brian?”

“He threw something all the way across the room, and it hit me in the head.” She gestured vaguely at her forehead, which wrinkled. “I still have a scar.”

Thunk.

She plainly didn’t hold any hard feelings about it. The memory amused her more than anything else. I was distracted by the image of my cousin Brian — who was, in high school, a sought after baseball player but in general, mostly, one of the nicest and amiable guys you’ll ever meet — assaulting my mother with…

“What did he throw?” I asked. “A rock?”

“I don’t remember.”

“A blow to the head will do that to you,” I said wisely.

Mom seemed more impressed than anything. “He had such good aim,” she said, and added inconsequentially, “Of course, this was before I married your father.” Which made a difference to her somehow, in a way I didn’t quite understand.

1971-1972 would have made Brian less than a year old, a remarkably precocious age to begin inflicting violence on his nearest and dearest.

I eyed my kid, who eyed me back.

Thunk.

As of today, it has been 15 years since my father passed away.

Yoshihiko Hirata, with sombrero (1960s)

I think about him more and more these days. Playing with Hobbes brings him back to me in a curious way that I had never expected. My father loved children so much — so very, very much — and in so many odd, quaint ways I see, or think I see, a ghost of my father in my son. He laughs, or thrills over some new discovery, or marvels over something he’s seeing again for the first time (or the fifth, or the sixth), or plans mischief and chortles proudly as he attempts to carry it out, and all these things remind me of how my father was, how our entire lives were made richer by his enthusiasms.

Everything about childhood was miraculous to him, probably because he never really grew up himself. Faced with children that were considered problem kids or that famous word, “trouble,” he always yearned to reach out to them and give them a place to stand, take root, and grow. It was the parents that he couldn’t stand; rightly or wrongly — and usually rightly — he blamed them when children were labeled difficult. In his world, parents are ultimately responsible for their children. It was a terrifying, terrible, and wonderful burden to place on their shoulders, and more than one family who started studying violin with him changed to study with my mother instead, when the parents were unable to live up to his standards.

In the back of my mind, I can feel how excited my dad would have been to meet his grandson, and how exuberantly, rambunctiously proud he would have been of everything Hobbes does. Smug though I am about how brilliant Hobbes is (”You’ve discovered gravity! With your head! You clever, clever boy!”) it’s only a fraction of what my father would have felt.

He would have loved Hobbes. He loved us, so it stands to reason. We were his entire world. Ours was made poorer when he left us without him, and it’s never been quite as shiny since. You never quite get over the loss of your first love.

Miss you, Dad.

Yoshihiko Hirata and dog, age unknown

I cleared my throat. “Ahem,” I said. I actually said that. Ahem.

The guys in IT broke off their conversation to look at me. It had something to do with, I don’t know. Security patches and dinosaurs. Some sort of cartoon. “You need something?” one asked.

“It is possible,” I began carefully, “that someone in this immediate vicinity has forgotten her laptop at home.”

They stared at me. I tried again.

“Someone in this immediate vicinity,” I said.

One of them started to grin. Once one started, it spread to the others.

“In this — approximate area,” I said loudly. “Someone has somehow neglected to bring their laptop in. It was an oversight and she freely admits it, but she was wondering–”

“Someone in the vicinity?” one asked.

I made a vague circular gesture. “In, say, a vicinity with a radius of about–” I measured. “–two or three yards….”

“Is this you we’re talking about?”

“It might be me,” I ventured.

My experiences of IT departments in other companies have not been, shall we say, salubrious. It is not so much that IT personnel have been mean and unhelpful as it is that my experiences of IT personnel at previous companies have been that they are not … let us say that they have not been big believers in the “service” part of “service industry,” and leave it at that. I came to my current company wary of IT staff; it would not be too much to say that I was a little terrified of them. Just a bit. Wee-ly. When one of them appeared at my desk a few days after I’d started and addressed me by name, I almost had an accident in my pants, purely on principle.

Two years into this job, I’ve learned that it is actually possible to have a functional, friendly, helpful IT staff. They were laughing at me by this point. “You want a loaner?” they asked kindly, and accepted without too much mirth my abject gratitude and groveling promises never to do it again.

“It’s the whole ‘having a baby’ thing,” I said. I’ve taken to blaming my strange lapses of memory on my son. Not unfairly, I might add. My memory was never this bad before I had him. Coming from a person who regularly used to forget how old she was and when her birthday was, and sometimes even forgot to swallow while eating, this is saying quite a bit. “At least I didn’t forget him at the house and bring the computer instead.”

“That’s important,” they said.

“I don’t see why I couldn’t have just remembered them both.”

“The important thing is that no one was hurt.”

I eyed them. “It is?”

“We don’t do this for everyone,” they told me, as they set up a laptop for my use. “But since you asked nicely–”

“I’ll never do it again, I swear.”

They laughed again.

That night, on my way out, I rode down in the elevator with another employee and one of the IT guys. “How was your day without a laptop?” my colleague asked me.

“Oh, IT lent me a laptop–” I began.

“We don’t always do that,” the IT guy jumped in. Hastily. Just in case she was getting any ideas. He looked at me with great reproach. You told.

“I swear,” I said.

A week later, I tip-toed into the IT cubes and cowered meekly in a corner until they noticed me.

“And what can we do for you?” they asked.

“The important thing here,” I said, “the important thing to realize, is that this morning I didn’t forget my baby. I didn’t leave him in the car. I didn’t leave him in the house. I took him to day care, dropped him off, I had his extra diapers, his bottles, his nipples, his baby food, even a change of clothing for him just in case. I signed him in, I put down the notes of his morning care–”

“You forgot your laptop again, didn’t you?”

“The important thing,” I said again. Loudly.

Mom came for a visit this past weekend on her way to her yearly Santa Rosa violin workshop. It took Hobbes only a few minutes to warm up to her; in almost no time flat they were engaged in their little mutual adoration society. While Mom continued to marvel over Hobbes’s development, Hobbes continued to cheer and point at her. He’s taken to doing this lately to things that are right in front of him, though “point” might be a misnomer since really what it is is an open-handed, splayed-fingered stretch with one arm or another towards the object of his interest. I’m uncertain as to the purpose of this particular gesture. Either he’s hoping that someone will be foolhardy enough to give him whatever it is that he wants, or he’s trying to point out to us the most obvious thing in the room, just in case we might have missed the fact that there’s a little old Japanese woman parked in the middle of the floor.

I’m certain this is a common thing for babies to do — most things my son does, while miraculous and magical and obviously the coolest things ever, seem to have been done (less skillfully and less dazzlingly, but with good intentions nonetheless) by other children at some point or another. Whatever the case, it seems as though neither my sister nor myself went through this particular stage of childhood development.

Mom regarded him thoughtfully while he was in full pointer mode towards the television, which was airing its usual fascinating program of black screen nothingness.

“Why did you teach him to salute Hitler?” she asked.

“You are so odd,” I said.

Hobbes cheered.

There was a time not so long ago when a vacation would mean sleeping in until the wee small hours of the afternoon, then lazily getting up and eating a bowl of ramen, watching some TV, getting in some hard core computer games — or maybe even a book — and then rolling back into bed around 2 AM with the smug, happy knowledge that people who had to go to work the next day would have been in bed for hours whereas I, privileged and entitled, was going to stay up for another two hours actually in the bed just so I could finish rereading some book I’d read six times before, purely to rub salt in the wound.

Nowadays I have a wee alarm clock named Hobbes who wakes up at 6:30 AM if he’s feeling friendly, 7:00 if he’s feeling lazy, but sometimes 5:30 if he’s feeling particularly ornery. Most alarm clocks you can slap on the head to turn on the snooze button, but they seem to have left that feature out when they were manufacturing this particular brand. All he has is volume and enthusiasm, but it’s quality volume and endless enthusiasm. True, his, “Wakey wakey!” comes out sounding an awful lot like a goat that has accidentally gotten its testicles caught between another goat’s teeth, but he’s young yet. It’ll take time for him to learn the mellifluous morning heraldry of Stephen Fry. We have hopes for the future. We own the entire series of Jeeves & Wooster on DVD solely for the purpose of training his inside voice.

I used to deny any merits to waking up early in my more disgruntled youth. Now that it’s an irrevocable part of my routine (this morning Hobbes woke us up at 6:30, but by the grace of a tolerant husband who decided to let me sleep in on my last day of vacation, I didn’t officially get out of bed until 8 o’clock) I’m willing to concede that there are some benefits to being awake before 9. For one thing, you get a lot of things done. Most of my vacation has been taken up with doing chores and taking care of household tasks that I’ve been meaning to do for weeks, even months, but haven’t been able to get to for one reason or another. In the past three work days alone, I have:

1. Gotten a haircut
   
2. Had an eye doctor appointment
   
3. Gotten contacts
   
4. Scheduled a painter estimate
   
5. Gotten a handful of living room floor choices
   
6. Looked for swimming schools
   
7. Found an old IRA I thought was lost
   
8. Filed some missing FSAs
   
9. Had lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of months
   
10. Got going on planning a party
    
11. Gotten some broken sporting goods fixed
    
12. Did two classes’ worth of homework

    Somewhere in there I even fit in a one hour nap, though that mostly consisted of me on a couch thinking, “Don’t I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday?”

    Oh. Right.

13. Canceled a dentist appointment

While none of these are, in and of themselves, particularly deserving of a sticker and praise, cumulatively they encompass the task list of months. There are things that I’ve still to do which I have, for one reason or another, not gotten around to yet. Rescheduling the dentist appointment, for instance. Vacuuming the stairs. I’ll get to them eventually; I consider myself hampered at the moment by the fact that I keep getting pulled into meetings and issues at work, which only occasionally respects my repeated announcements that I am “on vacation, goddammit, and I’m not– okay, fine. What do you need?” It occurs to me that I should be a little more decisive when I put my foot down. Other feet stomp. Mine seems to … squish.

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

“We like Totoro,” I told her.

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

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

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

“He’ll be at least half Japanese.”

“Hm,” she said, and signed off.

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

My Little Neighbor Totoro

“Holy crap,” I said, when I saw it.

“Do you think he’ll fit?” she asked.

“He’d better.”

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

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

So do I.

Thanks, Angela!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is he okay?” I finally asked.

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

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

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

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

“Holy shit!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not anymore,” the Guy said. “Idiot.”

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