Technical warning: moving to Wordpress.

...in theory.

Just in case everything goes hideously pear-shaped, it was nice knowing you all. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to make the move to Wordpress. I'm armed with the internet and a tech-savvy husband on the couch; what could possibly go wrong?

Deep breaths.

And here we go.

getting out the door

"Aww, who's a cute baby?" I crooned at Hobbes. He yawned hugely and then blinked off somewhere to my right, apparently fascinated by dancing air particles. He's always in his best mood just after he's woken up.

Me, I'm always in my best mood when I'm sound asleep, but who's keeping track. I blush to admit that I've taken to talking to my son like I'm a helium-snorting escapee from a gingerbread house-building witch community. Three months with little adult interaction and constant exposure to a small infant will do that to you.

"Mommy has to get ready for work," I told Hobbes, bouncing him on my hip. "That's why Mommy is going to put you down, so she can change her clothes."

Hobbes turned his head, blinked several times, gave me a glorious and toothless smile -- then regurgitated a good two ounces of milk all over my shoulder and right breast. This would have been more severe if I'd been wearing a shirt.

Motherhood accustoms one to certain things. Wet diapers. Spit up. Smelling like baby vomit. Sounding like a complete idiot.

"Awww," I said. Hobbes promptly planted his face in the white, gooey patch of his puke and rubbed it around, eventually coming up wearing most of it on his cheeks and eyebrows.

"Ew," I said.

Hobbes hiccuped dolefully.

I washed the baby and his clothes off and put him down on the changing table, where he tried to eat his fist while I washed my shoulder and bra off. "Silly boy," I said, like the fond and mentally deficient mother I am. "I should put a burp cloth on so you don't spit up on me anymore."

Yes, I really talk like this now.

I put the burp cloth down over my bare (and now clean) right shoulder, picked up my child, and held him up with one arm while I tossed the spit-up cloth into the laundry pile. Hobbes stared moodily at my ear, then dove unexpectedly for my other, unprotected breast ... and deposited another ounce of dribbly milk vomit into my bra's left cup.

"Shit," I said. He rolled off my boob and hung almost upside-down from my arm to go solemnly cross-eyed at the changing table. Hi, changing table.

I washed up and changed my bra while he played soccer with the comforter on my bed. For good measure, I put on a shirt and pants in preparation for work. While the half-naked look is in in California during most of the year, the day was a nippy 50 degrees and at no time is the sight of my naked torso an uplifting experience for unwary onlookers.

This time I covered my shoulder and breast with a blanket before picking the baby up and settling him comfortably in the crook of my arm. "There. Mommy is all dressed up," I cooed. "Will you miss her while she's at work?"

He stared at me, busily gumming the half of his fist that he had managed to take in, and mumbled something. I kissed him. He dove at me with an open mouth, in the hopes that my nose would turn out to be a nipple and my face an unorthodox breast. Past experience had not given him any indications that this was the case, but hope sprang eternal. I dodged. He ended up with a mouthful of my hair, which I had stupidly not pulled back yet.

Hi, hair. He spit up on it.

The wad of spit-up dripped warmly down my hair onto my cheek, and then onto my neck, where it slid down into my neckline before I could catch it and smeared like bile-scented taffy all over my chest.

For a long moment I seriously considered just leaving it there and just ... going to work. Cutting my losses. I stood there, smelling like baby puke, and thought really hard.

Hobbes burped and gave me another wet, happy smile.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I was an hour late to work.

first day back

Why yes, I did survive my first day back at work after a three month maternity leave, thank you for asking!

It was good to be back. It was also good to come home. The challenges and enjoyment of my job aside, how could I not be eager to come back to this?

monochrome media

It's 4:13 AM and I'm wide awake. The baby is asleep, which makes this a particularly piquant bit of schadenfreude for those of you who are monitoring my sleep patterns post-child; having won tonight over his propensity for waking up every hour after midnight, I find that my mind and body have become attuned to his unreasonable schedule. Gone are the nights when I am jerked awake in a hissing rage because the baby has seen fit to start screaming in the middle of my deepest sleep cycle. Now I preempt the possibility, with the result that I find myself a wanderer in the night with nobody willing to keep me company but the random oscillations of the internet.

Hello, internet.

Since I'm awake anyway, I thought I might as well post an entry -- not about the first day of work post-maternity leave, which is T-minus-5 hours away -- but about another issue that has been making the back of my teeth itch since the end of the summer Olympics in August and the beginning of the new television season in September. Namely, the media and how white it is.

I've written elsewhere about how underrepresented Asians are in the media, and how rare it is that minorities of any sort are predominant on any quality television show. I've gotten used to that. Barring the occasional show like Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty, which either turns a blind eye to color or has a recurring theme of culture clashes, it's the rare show that has Asians represented as anything other than Martial Artist Enforcer #2 or Sick Patient Guest Star #6. While it's gotten better of late (and by 'of late' I mean within the past decade) it's still rare enough that when an Asian does appear on the television in a show or in a commercial, we shout, "Asian! Asian on the TV!" and the rest of the household comes running to look.

When I was younger, I got used to not seeing faces like mine on my programs. If I thought about it at all, my assumption was that (1) in the 15 million or so Asians that populate the United States, there aren't any good actors; or (2) market research has advised Hollywood that Americans don't like to look at Asians. Curiously, neither of these bothered me much, which blessing I attribute to the colossal lack of self-esteem I had when I was growing up, which didn't need proof to buttress a crushingly bad self-image, combined with the perverse and uncontested superiority complex I had simply by being Japanese.

The summer Olympics changed some of that for me. I blame it on the fact that for the first time in, oh, ever, I turned on the television on a daily basis and saw faces like mine -- and not just faces like mine, but a lot of faces like mine, everywhere, constantly: in the background, in the foreground, winning medals, kicking ass and taking names -- and not just in martial arts, to which my racial type has mostly been segregated in fictional media. There we were, on primetime no less. I felt a startling and unexpected racial recognition, as though for the first time I was part of the American experience. What is more American than television? And there I was, represented at last, on the mirror that reflects millions of American lives as they are and wish they were.

By China.

Pause to reflect on the pathetic irony of that.

Against that backdrop, the ads for the coming season of shows were especially jarring. Hollywood -- I sweep corporate television into that generalized bucket -- has made inroads on minority representation, but this season has taken several steps back on that road, and it was all the more noticeable when you compared the spots for the new shows against the rich variety of the Olympics. It seemed to my admittedly suspicious eye that the promotional shots for all the new shows were designed to fit in at the local Ku Klux Klan Clam and Coors festivals. Leading characters of color were nonexistent. As far as the eye could see, there was a vast expanse of white.

And then cut back to the Olympics. In the year where the Olympics were hosted in China and a self-identified black man became our president, it is strange that I feel myself more disenfranchised than I ever have.

Which brings me to the thing that was brought to my attention yesterday.

From Firefox News...

In the past few days, rumblings have been heard in comments and postings around the Internet , as fans who reveled in the beauty of the Avatar world reeled at the news that their favorite characters might be portrayed by an all-white cast (partially picked at a casting call in . . . Texas, that noted hub of Asian and Inuit people)....

For a cartoon that began with the news of near-total genocide against the title character's entire culture, an all-white cast is a pretty low blow. And rather misses the point of the cartoon.

I'm a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, if I can use that word on the internet and not automatically be bunched with the slavering weirdness to which fandom can get in this particular venue. It's a cleverly written series with interesting characters and good animation, based on a creative and meticulously researched premise. Not least, and specific to the issue, it's a show based on Inuit and Asian cultures, which did not factor significantly into my enjoyment of the show.

I've looked at the photographs of the actors (and actress) that were shown, and I will freely acknowledge that there is a resemblance between the character of Katara -- the girl -- and the actress picked to play her. Having cast a white girl to play Katara, it goes without saying that the character of her brother must also be played by a white actor, and one could stretch a bit and say there is a passing resemblance between that actor and his character, in the sense that both of them are male and have dark hair.

And that's about as far as I would go.

There is a great disturbance in the internet among the Avatar fans about the casting, and at least one letter-writing campaign. The casting is not final, according to reports, and the apparent hope is that enough protest would result in a change of casting. If you're interested, I recommend you drop by and give the campaign a looksee. Personally, I consider success a slim chance if any, though the sentiment is nice and the suggested approach -- tying in a financial boycott with polite letters -- is surprisingly reasonable and intelligent for an internet movement of any kind.

Here's why I don't think it'll work. I find it hard to believe that a studio would invest the kind of money that would hire M. Night Shyamalan (who, whatever you may think of his movies or his ego, is big enough that he can command a significant salary) and buy the rights to a successful franchise, then not do the market research that would tell them that the movie-going Americans in the demographic they are targeting would rather see white kids than Asian or Inuit ones. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. A movie is not an insignificant investment, and no company stays in business without doing their due diligence.

Comics are a medium in which the racial boundaries have already been crossed. The dominance of Korean and Japanese animation houses and the flood of manga that have invaded bookstores and libraries around the US have seen to that. With comics and animation shows though, the Asians are safely two-dimensional and on paper. Live action is another thing altogether. God forbid we have actual Asians playing actual Asians on a potentially blockbuster movie -- even if it is ostensibly a martial arts film -- targeted towards our impressionable youth.

That I am not impressed by this casting should be pretty clear by now. I do not particularly appreciate the unsubtle message that Asian culture is really cool, as long as there aren't any actual Asians lolling about dirtying the place up. It may be that this is not a deliberately conveyed message, but it is one that not a few people will take away from it.

I may be overly cynical about this. Certainly the actors are not to blame for their casting or their race, however the latter played into the former, and it would be hard on them if there were changes made in the former based on the latter. For all I know, the casting director was not told to "find matches for the characters, preferably white." I am not familiar with the way Hollywood works, so I can't say how likely that is. However, I do know that movie-making is a business, and business is interested in making money, and in order to do that, they look at what will pay.

And what will pay, apparently, is not a face like mine.

My prediction is that the movie will end up well, even with the current fandom outrage about the casting choices. Production quality will be higher than it was in the fiasco of Sci-Fi channel's Earthsea whitewashing. On top of that, there is enough of a fan base for it to do decently in the box office, and unless mainstream news or blogosphere gets loud enough, the current brouhaha won't stop enough people that it will matter. Here and there I've read comments along the line that people are so upset by the situation, they don't know if they will even be able to enjoy the movie, which means that they will be giving the movie their money anyway. In short, they have given their tacit approval to the casting choices and will be giving Hollywood proof that they were right. I think that attitude will be prevalent for the majority of the supposedly indignant fans. I could be wrong. I certainly hope so.

Unfortunately, I don't think I am.

back pain and other signs of decrepitude

I was crossing the living room floor with the baby in my arms when suddenly, without any warning, my back gave out on me. I yelped and slowly collapsed like an overburdened skyscraper; it must have been an interesting experience for Hobbes, who warbled inquiringly. The Guy, who was getting ready for work and therefore a startled spectator, took a moment to figure out what was happening. Once he did, his first act was commendable -- he took the baby.

I ended on the floor, in a contorted pretzel of pain. Ow didn't seem to quite cut it, while Eeeeeeee lacked dignity.

I settled for a choked, "Ack," and thought hazily about writhing. Which I would have done, I promise, except that I couldn't seem to actually move.

It is ironic that the abuses to which I have been subjecting myself the last three months -- carrying an increasingly heavy baby about for hours at a time; tangling my limbs into odd angles to alternately extricate heavy carseats or insert carseats, whichever the case may be, from backseats; twisting about like a pipe cleaner to make room for a flailing, fragile infant who has taken over my bed and made sleep impossible -- should have caught up to me on the second to last day of my maternity leave, but there you go. It presumably had to happen sometime, which I would have realized if I had bothered to give it any thought at all.

My original intent was to spend the last two days of blissful maternity leave reveling in the company of my bobble-headed child. As it is, I spent most of the day gritting my teeth and trying to work through the pain, while the Guy played pragmatic nursemaid and poured ibuprofen down my throat at judicious intervals. Hobbes, perhaps picking up on my distress secondhand, was surprisingly docile for the majority of the day, and regarded with me great, dark-eyed worry when I had him nestled on my lap. Well, "me" is an overstatement. "My breasts," would be more accurate. "You won't leave me, will you?" seemed to be the gist of his concern -- again directed at my breasts rather than at me.

He has his priorities. Insofar as he is concerned, I am the ugly friend who drives the gorgeous babes to the milk bar so he can hit on them.

The Guy, as you might have guessed from the above, stayed at home today. This is two days in a row that we've had him at home. His start-up has him working Mondays through Saturdays, which means that even our weekends -- aren't. He worked from home yesterday; today his company's VPN kicked out until late, so he went ahead and took PTO. As of this writing (8:20 pm) he is downstairs in his home office, working, which sort of negates the whole concept of PTO -- but what can you do. Like me, he is a workaholic, and anyway the baby is upstairs dreaming round-headed baby dreams.

It's been a day for Events, small though those are in the scope of our lives. An anomaly on the Guy's latest bloodwork had him rechecked by his doctor, and resulted in a diagnosis of Thalassemia, of which he appears to be a carrier. It's a genetic blood disorder that's fairly common in his parents' part of the world, it seems; in and of itself it's fairly minor -- a propensity towards anemia in the future, maybe -- but if it turns out that I have it as well, there are some fairly significant and dangerous consequences for Hobbes. I scheduled a doctor's appointment as well for tomorrow, which just goes to show how my priorities have skewed. I hadn't bothered scheduling one for my injured back; the Thalassemia diagnosis changed my mind. Parenthood apparently means that you will go to the trouble of doing things for your child that you would never bother to do for yourself otherwise.

"Bugger," I said from the floor, while the Guy wandered around the house fetching pillows and answering Hobbes's inquisitive chirps. "I suppose this means we won't be taking Hobbes to Sears for his portrait tomorrow."

"Mm," said the Guy, who does not seem to believe in portraiture.

"I'll reschedule it for next week," I said. "You can take him in."

"Um," said the Guy.

"Did I mention I'm in a lot of pain?" I asked.

"Oop," said Hobbes, and triumphantly shoved his entire fist into his mouth.

zucchini bread

I was curled up in flannel pajamas and a ratty yellow robe that used to be down-soft but has been worn to a threadbare state that says without words, "my owner is a lazy shut-in who likes comfort and doesn't go out much," drinking chamomile tea with a dab of honey (ignore my diabetes for the moment) eating a slice of home-made zucchini bread -- the smell of which is currently filling all three floors of my house -- and reading an interesting book. (Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in case you're wondering. I recommend it.)

"This is the life," I was thinking. "It's cold outside, I'm warm and toasty, everything's good--"

--and then I heard the baby start to make hiccuping, whooping sounds over the baby monitor, the prelude to a full-onset crying jag, and my liver curled up into fetal position and started to whimper.

This is motherhood. The ups, the downs, the moments in between ... and when I'd let him cry it out for about 5 minutes with no end in sight, I untangled myself from my comfortable rocking chair, belted my robe, found a spot for my plate, put down my book, and went upstairs to see what was wrong this time.

Nothing, as usual. Nothing understandable by this gross giant of an oblivious parent, that is. I couldn't help but laugh a little when I saw Hobbes lying there with his mouth wide open, his eyes shiny black slits, wailing furiously about something that he absolutely couldn't communicate but was somehow all my fault.

Every time something goes near his face for any reason he opens that little mouth of his as wide as he can, in the hopes that whatever it is will somehow magically end up in it and turn out to be food. All the sushi I used to eat before pregnancy somehow manifested in him: he is part fish. The Japanese sound-effect for the open-mouthed fish goggling that snaps up food is cute. Paku. That's what we should have named him. Paku-chan.

Or Starscream. I dunno.

I came back downstairs after settling him to find that my tea had gone cold, my plate had tipped over, and I had somehow managed to lose my book.

Zucchini bread is best when it's warm and fresh. I cut myself another slice, found my book trying to mate with a John Scalzi novel by the stairs, and made new tea.

Recipe for zucchini bread, as written by my mother. Peculiarly, she can spell 'zucchini' just fine, but has difficulty with the plural form of 'egg' and the word 'vegetable.' It's a mystery.

Mix dry.
Mix wet.
Mix wet w/dry.
Pour into grease and flour loaf pan.
Bake 375 degrees 1 hour. Makes 2 loaves.

you said what?

Just this past week, Hobbes has not only become social, he has become super-social. The smile was just the crack in the dam between our grown-up attempts at communication and his blank, alien misfit thousand-mile stare. He has begun cooing and making small, inquiring sounds which he seems to enjoy hearing us attempt to mimicry back at him. Our attempts are not only pitiful, they are apparently hilarious. I have been on the receiving end of not a few toothless, happy grins at my feeble assays at baby talk; I suspect I'm mangling something along the lines of a "Your mutha'" joke, and Hobbes is having a joyous time at my expense.

I might as well get used to be laughed at by the younger generation. It's all downhill from here anyway.

There is one week left of my maternity leave -- I return to the office on December 15th full-time, though only for a week since on the 20th we leave for Seattle until the 31st -- and I confess that I'm not looking forward to returning to the grind as much as I thought I would. When I originally requested my maternity leave, I was basing the time I'd request on my past experiences of vacations. Mostly, I find ways of working on my vacations, because I am (1) slightly stupid; and (2) obsessive about work. The proper phrase is "workaholic," and while I do enjoy the time away from the office, I'm usually wild to get back into it as soon as the vacation period starts winding down. There was nothing in my experience to suggest that maternity leave would be anything different. I figured that a couple of weeks into it, I would already be dying to get back to work.

"Your priorities will change," my boss told me kindly, if a little apprehensively.

"Hah," I said. "Right. There'll be a--" I waved a hand in vague, vague, vague speculation. "Thing."

"Baby."

"Right."

It seemed to worry my boss that I needed reminding.

In any event, it turns out that he was right, which shouldn't be a surprise and yet is, because I am Japanese and of course as a Japanese person I do not get attached to people, because people can be left behind in places like battlefields and grocery stores and Iowa, whereas ideals and governments go on and on like brie shoved in the bookshelf to age, ripen, and eventually melt. I blame the American half of me, which has somehow melted the Japanese half's cold, briny heart and attached it with electrodes to the pulse of this small, dotty infant who cannot even hold up his own head because it is too big for his stubby little neck.

The ways of biology are mysterious.

There was a point to all this.

I forget.

Aunt Sako

Sako came to town over Thanksgiving week to visit her boyfriend, who is currently working as an ER nurse at Stanford Hospital. As an afterthought, she came to visit us as well, given that we were only 15 minutes away. I didn't press her on which one of us was the priority, given that I have my suspicions and it would be unkind to force her back to the wall -- not that she would particularly mind lying to our faces, but in the principle of not deliberately putting temptation in front of my little sister's face, well.

She hadn't met Hobbes before, but then again, she also hadn't seen her boyfriend for two months. Of the two, the boyfriend was a known factor. Hobbes was a blobby image she'd only seen through pictures and hearsay; my mother is certainly not a biased judge of either character or looks insofar as her first and only grandchild is concerned, so one can be pardoned for skepticism on the part of onlookers. From all accounts, she is handing out pictures of Hobbes like candy to all and sundry, and given that I am currently writing thank you cards for gifts from friends of hers, not to mention violin students that I do not even know, I suspect even polite strangers are not exempt from this treatment.

It's quite touching, especially since she tries to put on the mask when we're on the phone together. "You can't spoil him," she told me sternly, only to melt like a Vichy pudding when she sees him over Skype.

Sako was not the most enthusiastic participant in the pregnancy experience. I only saw her a couple of times during the 9 months, and that was far enough along in the process that I was actually showing -- and not just showing (which I didn't start to do until about month 5) but showing a lot. She came by in July at Mom's orders to paint our nursery. Her chagrin at seeing my stomach was comical, if a little disturbing considering her planned career as a nurse.

"Ew," she said. "You're pregnant."

"You knew that." I moved to hug her. She shied away.

"What?" I demanded.

"Don't touch me. What if it's contagious?"

I can only hope that her nursing school is able to clear up some of her more worrisome misconceptions.

She spent the rest of her visit working our house over and periodically poking me in the stomach with a pencil. ("Ew. It's firm.") By the time she left, three days later, she'd worked her way up to poking my stomach gingerly with the very tip of her finger and then jerking away very quickly, in case the thing that was in my belly would somehow take offense and come after her with a syringe full of sperm.

With that in mind, I was somewhat curious to see what her first encounter with Hobbes would be like. Would she run away? Would she avoid him entirely? Would she poke him repeatedly with a pencil until I was forced to call Child Protective Services?

As it happened, she and Hobbes hit it off like a charm.

"He's so small," she marveled, and settled gingerly into a chair with him to stare. He stared back. They communed. "And squishy. Look at those cheeks." She pinched one cautiously; when it didn't fall off, she prodded it to see what would happen next.

He yawned. Compared to his parents, Aunt Sako was an amateur.

By the time we all went out to dinner, a couple of days later, she was an old hand with the child. They called Mom together over Skype, Hobbes with unfocused disinterest, Sako with a great deal of pride. "My nephew," she kept calling him, with a small emphasis on the my. John, her boyfriend who occasionally works Pediatric ER, was both bemused and amused in his mellow way.

"He's cute," Sako told him.

"All babies are cute," he said. This did not satisfy her.

"Yes, but he's cuter."

"You're biased," I told her.

"You are," said John.

"No I'm not. He's cute."

"Biased," the Guy said.

"Yeah," said John.

"You don't think he's cute?"

John said, agreeably, "Sure."

"We're biased too," the Guy said.

"A bit," I said.

"I'm not biased at all," Sako said. "Why would I be biased? He's just cuter that most babies, is all. And," she added with an air of setting the seal on her argument, "Mom thinks so too."

"Because she's not biased at all," I said.

"I'm not," said Sako, and glared at John.

John, prudent man, grinned. "Right," he said. "Not at all."