Clarity 2012

A good night

2012-02-01T00:37:00.001-05:00

After work I went with a colleague to Cibreo for some happy hour drinks. A couple of good rounds of laughs and good-natured bitching. Afterwards I met L, Alice, and friends for dinner. J was in town for a couple days and I was looking forward to a leisurely evening of laughs and revelry. When I arrived at the apartment the baby girls were just coming out of the bath, all wearing their pajamas - N in hearts, Alice in pink and red footies, P in her blue footies. The girls giggled and swarmed around the apartment as the adults prepared dinner.

I left the apartment, so briefly, to buy some bourbon and ice cream - 3 pints from Ben and Jerry's for $12 - strawberry cheesecake (the classic), Boston Cream Pie (the chocolate), Cinnamon Buns (the wild card). Back inside the ladies were drinking dirty martinis while the men moved on to bourbon. Around 9 or so some wonderful Asian noodly dish made its way to the table as the baby girls slept or mumbled in the bedrooms. We ate and laughed, ate and laughed. Dinner plates were replaced by bowls and ice cream. Alice grew upset, so around 10 pm we brought her back into the fray. She was charming, eating her ice cream, speaking into the remotes as if they were telephones, hugging and flirting with all of us. J&A gave us our Christmas presents: a ridiculously hipster hoodie for me, plus a bookstore gift certificate, and a Kindle for L. J said "we love you" so casually and easily that it must be true.

Finally we coaxed a jacket onto our daughter and packed everything into a cab. Made it home here, watched some television. As I write this I finished some work stuff and L is asleep in the other room. Tomorrow morning I'll see my friend J briefly, briefly, before he returns to Spain until the summertime. But it will be enough.

The refrain tonight - "it feels like Friday, but it's only Tuesday." Such small sweet pleasures in life - good food and drink, friends you love dearly. Considerate gifts. A child eating ice cream late at night in her borrowed pajamas; the chance for our daughter to be the girl who stays up, the one who gets to sneak into our nighttime conversation, to see her parents with their friends, so happy, so grateful.

Night rhythms

2012-01-24T00:40:00.001-05:00

Tonight, after Alice and I finally got home, after Alice took her bath, after we attempted to FaceTime with L in Atlanta while Alice was in the tub, resulting in an anguished Alice reaching her soapy hands towards L's face enclosed by the distressingly small face of the phone, after reading books and kissing goodnight, after watching the debate, after doing some work and agonizing over the unkempt state of my inbox, after looking around the quiet apartment, I remembered that something good had happened today. I had been worried about something for a while, and got a phone call in the middle of a meeting this morning telling me that things were okay. When my phone started vibrating, I knew immediately what it was, and I was able to stride out of the conference room with the unquestioning confidence I can never seem to muster when I really need it. I got my good news and came back into the meeting, taking that idea and folding it neatly and placing it in my pocket.

And then tonight I discovered it again. To celebrate I decided to pour some Sambuca for myself and add three coffee beans. As Alice slept and the city lay dark and still outside the windows, I cleaned the kitchen and listened to music, washing tupperware and making sandwiches for tomorrow, gathering all my ingredients for morning oatmeal, portioning my carrot sticks for lunch. In the shadowy kitchen I let my iPod be my guide, gliding through the night with the slow, true old songs made for evenings like this.

Ever since I was in high school these late hours were made for music and quiet. Singing low in my night kitchen reminded me of the solitude that I don't often experience anymore, for great reasons -- but what joy there was to be found in those old slow songs, a voice worn and lowered by the length of the day, a clean kitchen ready for the morning, a glass of sambuca at hand, patient and restorative, and the memory of good news to absolve the day of worry.

Books of the year, 2011

2011-12-31T17:22:00.001-05:00

In chronological order, here are the books I loved most in 2011:

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Something is Out There by Richard Bausch
Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar edited by Richard Ford
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Themes of this year's reading: more short fiction; more biography; bloated long novels; and starting things without finishing them. New batches of short stories from Alice Munro and Richard Bausch were as enticing and flawless as their previous efforts. Adam Ross wrote stories that made me jealous. And the Ford-edited collection, a gathering of stories dealing with work, achieved an unexpectedly elegant cohesion with its subject matter. It made me think about how we relate to our jobs and vocations in a new way, and to see diverse writers grapple with this fundamental source of identity and purpose was inspiring.

This year I also found myself getting stuck in long novels that could have used some decent editing, particularly Paul Murray's Skippy Dies and, as much as it pains me to say it, 1Q84. It frustrated me to wade through bloated prose that deserved to be leaner and finer. I am usually very lenient with big ol' doorstops, but these books tested my patience (even if I enjoyed the ride, as in the Murakami).

This year I also ended reading chunks of books and then dropping them, for various reasons: The Imperfectionists, Love and Summer, Madame Bovary, and others. This was embarrassing but unavoidable.

I think my favorite novel this year was The Lonely Polygamist, a sprawling look at a polygamist in contemporary Utah. The writer juggled multiple voices and created a universe all his own. It was moving, funny, exciting, and unpredictable. It's a long novel that justified its scope and breadth.

I'm currently reading Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (as I said I would in last year's annual book round-up, oddly enough). I've been pleasantly surprised so far - Trollope knows how to maintain the reader's interest, and his characters are well-developed, complicated, and profoundly, irredeemably selfish. It makes for great reading (more on this soon). Other books in the queue for 2012: The Steve Jobs biography, Game of Thrones, and who knows what else. I'm hoping the final volume of Lyndon Johnson comes out in the fall, and then we'll see whatever comes my way. Hooray for reading!

Music of the year, 2011

2011-12-31T17:06:00.004-05:00

My music consumption this year was dominated by two big, random albums. Last winter I bought Diddy-Dirty Money's "Last Train to Paris," a completely synthetic piece of music that nonetheless captured my interest for much of the year. For this album Sean "Diddy" Combs gathered two girl singers by his side and attempted to replicate the magic of his old duet with Keyshia Cole, "Last Night." The result was a solid and shockingly consistent album of R&B/electronic/dance music. My two favorite tracks were the classily named "A** on the Floor" and the epic "Shades." Although the videos for this album were uniformly grim and lifeless, like some kind of dank urban vampire film, the music was compulsively danceable and great for running. There were a good 6-8 songs I really loved here, which is rare. This was an amazing album for me.

The second big album this year was Foster the People's "Torches," a relentlessly peppy and energetic jumble of indie rock with deep undercurrents of R&B and hip hop (at least as I found it). The rock elements were balanced by some good electronic arrangements and some definite swag. This album reminds me of training for the marathon in Central Park and it revs me up. There were a lot of great songs on here: "Helena Beat," "Life on the Nickel," "Miss You," among others.

Inspired by "Torches," I followed Foster the People down the rabbit hole of Pandora to discover myself really enjoying some twee white people music performed by dirty hippies. Two songs really wormed their way into my consciousness and conjured great feelings about life and family: The Middle East's "Blood" and "Home" by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. (I'm a couple years late on the latter, but whatever.) I found myself enjoying a lot of other songs of similar ilk, although I couldn't help thinking that this is music for racists who don't want any trace of black culture in their music. I don't know if this is true or not.

There were some other great songs this year too. I enjoyed the unabashed dance music of David Guetta's "Where Them Girls At," featuring Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj, and Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love." The-Dream released an EP online under his given name, Terius Nash, that was mostly forgettable except for the aggressive and rhythmic "Ghetto," featuring a great verse by Big Sean. Kelly Rowland's song "Motivation," featuring Lil Wayne, was an odd little confection. I'm still not sure what the song is actually about, but it always engaged me with its mysterious structure and lilting chorus. The remix with Trey Songz was great too. And Kelly's former bandmate Beyonce had some interesting songs on her latest album, particularly "Countdown," featuring a bizarre use of a Boyz II Men video and a music video that was irresistible and jubilant.

One other album hit it big for me this year, like it did for everybody: Adele's "21." At this point she has reached a peak of cultural saturation, and the recent SNL sketch mocking the emotional depth of "Someone Like You" both proved the point and laughed at the power of the song. But "Rolling in the Deep" remains a profoundly amazing song, and other songs carried a similar power and honesty, especially "Turning Tables" and her cover of "Lovesong."

Overall this didn't feel like a great year of music. There were albums I meant to get, like the new Coldplay and the new Drake, but I just didn't. I feel like I'm aging out of pop music and hip hop, and a lot of R&B feels musty and repetitive. Where do I go now? Into the flannel-clad arms of all these bearded white people? I refuse to let that happen. In the meantime I'll keep listening to find something new, something to keep me moving.

Shake Shack

2011-12-19T23:15:00.002-05:00

The other Friday night the three of us headed down to 79th Street to have dinner at Shake Shack. It was a cold night on the Upper West Side, the kind of night that reminds me of my first year in the city, when I would walk down to the Loews theatre on 68th Street to watch movies by myself on Saturday nights. It's the feeling of being wrapped up in a hat and scarf, carrying a book, and knowing you have everything you could need for the moment.

Shake Shack was its usual riot of children and strollers, but we were able to find a table by the wall-length windows. The glass was cold and dark to our touch, but we were warm and comfortable. The food was delicious. Afterwards we walked eastward back towards the train. Alice acquiesced to wearing her hat and mittens, and we made our way by playing "One-two-three-RUN," in which the family counts to three and then runs for a bit. She was flushed and beautiful. I carried two half-drunk milkshakes in my hands. It was a good night.

December/Christmas

2011-12-19T23:06:00.005-05:00

Ah, December. Where are we. Our Christmas tree this year is a thing of beauty. It's taller than last year's, and Alice seems impressed by it. We have rituals during the day when we plug in the lights and turn the tree "on," after the fanfare of Alice's countdown (parents: "one..." Alice: "two...three!"), and she and I have a ritual at night of watering the tree (both of us kneeling on the ground, an incantatory "pour pour pour," following a similar counting exercise). We have taught her to treat the tree gingerly -- after a few early ornaments made the ultimate sacrifice -- and now Alice eyes it warily, an object of beauty stricken with risk.

I'm trying to compile my lists of my favorite songs of the year and the best books I read, so it's time to take stock of the year. When I look backwards I see a lot of great things. In chronological order: I took an amazing writing class; we went to Spain; we went to Rehoboth; I ran a marathon; we cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Throughout the year I felt good about my work professionally, and I've had a good semester with my students. Alice has brought an absurd, abundant measure of joy into our lives. We worry about money, but we sleep well most nights.

In some ways, though, I also feel like this year has been affected by an undercurrent of exhaustion, or compromise. There is never enough time or energy to do what I think I should be doing. Time spent pursuing my own endeavors -- exercise, running, writing -- often feels like time taken away from my family. After spending much of my work day staring at a computer and pinging back emails, I struggle to want to come home to write for pleasure, or to write the personal emails that I should be sending to maintain important ties. After a workweek spent sprinting through our precarious routines, I can't find it in myself to get up early for the gym on Sunday mornings. It just doesn't make sense right now. And yet there's always time for garbage television. But I'm trying to revise my internet consumption to get away from the things that don't really excite me -- no more Gawker, less Facebook. Less time wasted, hopefully.

I think as 2012 begins I want to try to be more purposeful about the decisions I make, how I decide to expend my time and energy. Because this was a good year, and I think a great one could be around the corner. It feels good to put words together. I want to do more of that.

More to come in the next few days.

Thanksgiving!

2011-11-30T22:59:00.001-05:00

There's not much to say about Thanksgiving besides the fact that it was wonderful. Four generations around the table -- a table nearly buckling under the weight of so much good food, most of it prepared by my beautiful wife/executive chef, L. My grandma said the turkey was the best she's ever eaten. The weather was nice enough to allow for plenty of long walks and an excursion to Central Park. We all had the chance to express our gratitude for the chance to be together to celebrate the holiday and enjoy the gifts and blessings of a growing family. I don't know what more one could want.

...Oh wait! I DO know what more one could want. We had a huge debacle in the morning thanks to the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. We had received tickets from an extremely kind colleague of L's, so my parents and I, along with Alice, trooped down to Columbus Circle early in the morning to claim our seats in the bleachers in Central Park. We unexpectedly had to walk ten blocks north to get to the only available entrance, and by the time we got there, the police weren't allowing anybody else in. People were walking out of the parade route area a block away, telling all of us who were assembled, "Don't bother! There's nowhere to sit and you can't even see! We had tickets too!" As you may be able to tell, the people telling us this were fashionable gay men who were waving their hands in disgust. We bought Alice a blow-up Dora the Explorer doll as a consolation prize (she loves it - ever since she has been pushing Dora in the stroller, dancing with Dora, making us include Dora in "Ring Around the Rosy," and dragging Dora to the table to eat with us).

So, rejected by the parade, we went to a little cafe to eat some breakfast, where we encountered the people I will always think of fondly as the Thanksgiving Assholes of 2011. Let me set the scene: picture three rectangular two-top tables lined up along the window. Simple, right? We pushed two tables together to accommodate our party, dumped our stuff there, and went to get our food. When we returned, we found that the Thanksgiving Assholes - a well-dressed middle aged couple - had turned the remaining two-top around, so that both seats were now parallel to the window I guess, which had the effect of blocking us from getting into our table. I said, excuse me, please let us in, and my polite mom said, oh, we'll just sit elsewhere (forcing us to crowd around a skimpy little table), and the male Thanksgiving Asshole said, "Oh, you'll be fine, there's plenty of room there." The woman concurred, and after a bit more completely disrespectful small talk, the encounter was formally over.

But not for me, of course! I spent the rest of the meal shooting them dirty looks, saying loud remarks like "that was really rude" and "we have no room for my daughter now," and subtly jabbing the man with our inflatable Dora. Even days later, while out on a run, I thought about them and their absolute thoughtlessness and blithe disregard for us and got irritated again. I hope their turkey tasted like sand. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hand, foot and mouth

2011-11-26T00:08:00.000-05:00

There was a period last week when I was debilitated by a nasty little virus called Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease. Alice had it first, an extremely mild case, thank God, and then passed it to me. On Friday night I felt feverish and exhausted. On Sunday bright red little sores started pocking the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. I had a few sores on my face but thankfully I was spared the wounds on the inside of the mouth that make it nearly impossible to eat.

Over the next few days these sores blossomed into bright throbbing little nubs of pain. I could barely walk. It hurt to bend my fingers. My extremities felt red-hot, contorted by this raging pressure. I went to work on Monday but left after half the day. My colleagues were horrified. People asked if I was staggering because of a marathon-related malady, and I told them no. I had to lean on my desk and lurch sideways to open the door to my students. I didn't go to the bathroom because I couldn't bear the idea of walking that far. At home, when I removed my shoes and socks, I felt sure that my feet would be covered in blood.

At home I crawled to the bathroom on my hands and knees to avoid pressure on my feet. It felt a little better to elevate my feet, so I sat on the couch, responded to work emails, and watched wretched daytime programming like "The Talk." I stayed home on Tuesday, in a haze of Benadryl. By Wednesday the sores started receding, yet even today my hands and feet are still slightly pocked. The skin along my fingers and toes has been peeling for days now and I don't really know when this process will be completely over. I am basically molting dead skin over everything.

The key point here is: it's disgusting, and it knocked me out for a couple of days. I just wanted to record this for posterity.

Marathon closure

2011-11-25T23:50:00.000-05:00

Well, it happened. I finished the marathon, a couple weeks back. My final time was 4:04:27, nine minutes slower than last time, and four minutes under the stark boundary of the four-hour line. It was a very intense experience, in some ways more difficult than last time. Due to the demands of work and family I really pulled back on the training in the last couple months, basically abandoning my mid-week runs and focusing solely on the Saturday long runs, which generally went well through the entire program. As a result I knew I was taking a gamble on marathon day; the question was, did I train enough?

Well, yes and no. I trained enough so that I felt pretty darn good the day after the marathon - no injuries, no sprains, no lingering effects. Unfortunately, though, I did feel like I ran out of steam during the final third of the race. I was breathing fine, my legs felt great, but I just felt tapped out. I was fantasizing about icy glasses of Coke; my mouth would actually tingle with anticipation as I ran. I felt that if I let my eyes close, I would fall asleep mid-stride. During the run I had to go to the bathroom four times, which never, ever, ever happens. And I took the chance to talk to L, Alice, and my folks for a minute the three times I saw them, for three reasons: to make sure Alice understood that I was there, to reassure everyone that I was okay, and to make the whole endeavor a little more worthwhile of their time.

Running the New York marathon for a second time was surprisingly similar to the first. I was sorry to realize it, but it felt like a diminishing return. The great parts were great. The tough parts were really tough. And there were no real surprises. The crowds were supportive when they yelled out my name, unless I was walking in pain, at which point they felt taunting. This time around I tried hard to high-five all the little kids in Brooklyn, when I felt great and invincible. During the final miles, when Central Park seemed absolutely alien to me through my fog of exhaustion, I couldn't stop myself from walking. I was more generous with breaks than I have ever been before. I tried not to hold myself to an impossible standard, but I couldn't, so I wasn't pleased with things.

After the race I staggered through the finishers staging area in desperate need of a porta-potty. I rehydrated too quickly and ended up vomiting over a fence in the park, a few dozen yards away from Central Park West. After we reunited, as I walked with my family searching for a cab, they peppered me with questions about the run, and I just said, "Can we please not talk about it yet." At home I vomited again, took an ice bath, took a shower, fell asleep. Two hours later I was awake and ravenous. I ate heartily, drank a lot of Coke, and told everyone about the day's adventure. I was fine, I was a champion.

I don't mean to sound negative about the experience, but I think this was my last New York marathon for a while. Now I'm thinking about next year's Marine Corps Marathon in DC, not to break any speed records, but to give myself a challenge and a goal. Ultimately what I learned is that my modified training schedule actually worked pretty darn well, given the demands on my time and the fact that I'm four years older than the last time around. (As my mom pointed out, I'm also heavier than I was last time. As I looked at her, agog, she added, "Well, we all said it!") And most importantly, I did the race and I'm not injured. Last time I ran it was six months before I laced up my running shoes again. The training process had exhausted me and given me knee pain that lasted for weeks. Yet I've already been running since this marathon, and I'm very deliberate about starting a new chapter in my running life right away. I may not have triumphed on marathon day the way I hoped to, but I endured in a way that I didn't quite expect. And that kind of sneaky lesson is what the marathon is all about.

Marathon eve

2011-11-05T23:20:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow is the marathon! The thought of this puts a weight in the pit of my stomach. I can't believe it's here, and that this largely theoretical training program of mine is about to come to fruition. Doing this the second time around is very different. I'm not full of the abject fear and wonder of what the experience would be like. I'm not asking myself, "Are you even going to finish it?" Last time around, when there were a lot of people cheering for me and wearing homemade t-shirts, I needed that support and enthusiasm to paper over my own doubts and worries. This time I feel more confident, more ready to enjoy the experience.

In some ways the marathon is a passive thing, like riding the rapids - you enter the current of runners and follow it, turning when they turn, pounding your feet in time with all the others. You wear a shirt with your name on it and listen to people cheer for you. You mentally tick off the miles, the landmarks, the boroughs, and note that the pain and discomfort you are uniquely experiencing is being shared by the people around you, all in their own way.

This time around I feel like I am making some smarter decisions. I can't expect to beat my time from four years ago -- a simpler time, a more fit time, a time of graduate school and oodles of hours to go running in the middle of the week -- but I'm going to try. My training schedule, slashed by the mostly welcome demands of family and work, seems to have still positioned me well for this event. I think my concerns now are more based in the logistics of the whole thing: getting to the Staten Island ferry on time, staying warm while we wait, not getting bored or getting too lost in my head during those slow hours of anticipation. Once we run, once we are launched out of the cannon, then all I have to do is finish it. It's just another long run.

This is the marathon! This time is for Alice. Wish me well.

Moments with Alice

2011-11-03T23:21:00.000-04:00

I worked late tonight and came home when Alice had already been in bed for about half an hour. We could hear her burbling in there. I thought to myself, I want to see her.

I went in and she turned around to look at me. She stood up in her crib and raised her arms so I could lift her, first gathering up her blankie and her froggy and her little striped zebra and her board book about counting. Her pacifier bobbed in her mouth. I picked her up and whispered hello, and she pointed to the rocking chair behind me. I sat down and she leaned into me, her legs around my waist, resting her head against my chest. I could see her eyes closing beneath me. We rocked for a while. Hoped she could hear my heart beat. After a bit she leaned back and we made funny faces at each other, and she would laugh quietly at me. She poked at the buttons on my shirt, saying "boop," like we do. "Are you ready to get back in your crib?" She nodded.

I stood up -- her book fell to the floor and we leaned over to pick it up. She was silent as I lowered her into the crib. I walked over to the side, near the door, and squatted down so that we could share a goodnight kiss through the wooden slats. "Goodnight sweet girl, I love you." One more kiss and then she turned to her blankie. I went back into the family room. Best part of the day.

12, 13.1, 20 miles

2011-10-16T16:58:00.002-04:00

Marathon training update!

12 miles: Two weeks ago I did a nice leisurely twelve miles through Central Park. After the previous 18-mile disaster, my goal here was just to survive. The run went very well; I felt great, especially with the short distance, and there was a half-marathon road race occurring at the same time. On the plus side this meant that I could take advantage of the water and Gatorade prepared for the runners; on the negative side this meant that I was completely subsumed by a tidal wave of fast runners during the last quarter of the run, when I was at my slowest and most pathetic. But the race went well, and I don't care what other people think of me!

13.1 miles: Last weekend I participated in the Staten Island Half Marathon. Woke up at 5 to take the train all the way to South Ferry, then the ferry over to the island. Staten Island, it turns out, is kind of a pit. We ran through some industrial areas with very little shade or scenery, and the landscape was so bleak that they had a couple of DJs stationed intermittently to keep things moving. Even though the day was hot, I was very pleased with my time. I did well, and I think the excitement of running on unfamiliar roads (rather than the intimately familiar topography of Central Park) gave me some fresh power. On the way back I felt a little queasy, but I distracted myself by talking to some nice Canadian tourists about all the sights and sounds of our fair city. I came back and showered at the our old gym in the Village, which was about as nostalgic and bittersweet as showering at a gym can be, I guess.

20 miles: Today I ran 20 miles! Approximately. I ran down the West side of Manhattan, then back up the east side, then cut over along 110th street until I reached my familiar end-point in the Park. The run went very well - I felt good and strong, although on the Upper East Side I couldn't figure out how to get down to the riverfront, so I had to stagger along York and First Avenues for much of the time. Also, early on in the run, there were a couple of miles when I was afraid I had pooped myself a little. But thankfully, false alarm! I felt good and strong after the run, too, and I think I figured out the nutritional/hydration element I had been missing: I carried some salt packets and pretzels with me, and I snacked on them at the halfway point as well as at the finish. It was a little odd downing a packet of salt (it all just stuck to my tongue, until I drank something to wash it down), but my body seemed to appreciate it.

Now, I just have shorter runs until the actual marathon, three weeks from today. It's happening! And I'll be ready.

Eighteen miles

2011-09-25T20:02:00.003-04:00

What brutality! Today was the official marathon "Tune Up" race, 18 miles through Central Park, three scathingly repetitive six-mile loops. Because I expected it to be cold and rainy, I wore long pants and a long-sleeve shirt (my official 2007 marathon shirt, as a matter of fact - I wanted some of its mojo today). As soon as I arrived at the race I realized I must have made a grave miscalculation. Everyone else was wearing standard warm-weather running gear, and there I was, wearing basically an athletic burqa. At some point during the race, around mile 6, a woman ran alongside me and said, "You're really overdressed compared to everyone here, huh?" Who says that? "I feel great," I said huffily, "Have a great run." I pulled away and was happily convinced that I had left her in my dust, until I saw her trotting along ahead of me a few minutes later. Oh well.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a high point of the race. It was hot and humid and I was drenched in sweat. I tried to stay well-hydrated with gatorade and water and allowed myself generous walking breaks. I even tried one of those disgusting goo packets, full of carbs and electrolytes in a liquid with the consistency of motor oil. After the race ended, as my leg muscles blazed and the sweat continued pouring, I jumped in a cab to head home - L had to go to a work function on Staten Island and I needed to return to watch Alice as quickly as possible.

"You look a little piqued," L told me. I felt horrible. I couldn't stray far from the bathroom. After L departed it was just me and LB (Alice), which meant that during my long sojourns to the bathroom, I had to leave the door open to keep an eye on the baby. So during the same period of time when it felt like I was losing all of the fluids (and several of the major organs) in my body, thus rendering me basically incapacitated, Alice was sitting there merrily unrolling toilet paper or playing with feminine hygiene projects. The low point arrived when I had to inform L by text that I had just thrown up into a trash can while sitting on the toilet, and that Alice had watched the whole thing. She stared at me with a disconcerting mixture of innocent curiosity and prurient interest.

At this late point in the day I have finally managed to keep some food down, and my skin is no longer the color of paper. Was this an obstacle on my marathon journey? Yes, yes it was. Over the coming days I will try to figure out how and why my body betrayed me so. But am I giving up on my marathon dreams of 2011? No, sir, I am not. I'm busted, but not broken.

Sixteen miles

2011-09-20T21:57:00.004-04:00

Saturday's run was a sixteen-miler. I was very anxious about it overnight; I kept waking up wondering if it was time to go yet. I was worried that my dinner wasn't substantial enough to fuel me through. The run was okay - I am still being slow and generous with myself, but my leg muscles were just exhausted by the end. I feel like I am good cardio-wise, but I am trying to work on my leg muscles. I have accumulated an almost silly regime of preparation and recovery: Nip guards! Vaseline on the thighs! Two bottles of Gatorade! Ice baths! There is no glamor in this task.

In other news, our nanny quit on Wednesday, after missing work on Tuesday for health reasons, and announced that Friday would be her last day. Amid a week of bad news and unpleasant events, this one took the cake. We pulled it together and hired a delightful new nanny on Saturday, and so far she is great. Our third nanny in about 14 months. I'm feeling like Destiny's Child up in here, but hopefully now things can settle down.

September 11th, ten years later

2011-09-11T23:31:00.000-04:00

For the last couple of days I've been immersing myself in a lot of the immediate coverage that followed the terrorist attacks ten years ago. It's hard not to watch the footage without a rock in my stomach. The newscasters' fumbling narration in real time, the background whine of sirens that seemed so feeble in the face of such destruction.

When I think about my life, I tend to believe that the Modern Era -- that is, adulthood -- began when I graduated college and moved to New York in 2002. September 11th occurred during the first few weeks of my senior year at UVA. My memories of that day are stark and clear, and many of the people with whom I experienced that day are still deeply involved in my life (most especially, my wife). When I arrived in New York months later that experience was still burned onto the short-term memory of the city. Every summer hordes of young people arrive in the city determined to start their lives, and I felt proud to be part of the first wave of new arrivals following the attacks. Yet I also felt like an interloper -- someone who skips the funeral but attends the reception afterwards.

Living in the city has given me a new intimacy with the events of that day, a new understanding of the geography of grief. I used to run by Ground Zero all the time when we lived downtown. My wife's old workplace was near the scene of a major staging area for the first responders. The same hospital where the victims were sent, where Cardinal Egan stood outside administering last rites to the dead and dying, is where my daughter was born.

Today L and I took Alice downtown to get out of the house and go eat at a burger joint from back home. Impromptu memorials had been established all around the old neighborhood, in front of firehouses, along the chain-link fence where people have hung dozens of ceramic tiles commemorating that day. On the subway we saw many law enforcement personnel in dress uniform. We saw people who had come from the major memorial service, relatives of the victims, including someone who wore a badge identifying them as a reader of the names. I felt frivolous sitting there in my shorts with my soda, frivolous and irreverent in the face of their grief and the tragedy this city -- now my city -- endured.

And yet life goes on. Just like ten years ago, this weekend felt like one of the last vanishing weekends of summer. Today Alice enjoyed her french fries and milkshake, and she was smiling and chatty for her momma and daddy. Events that were unthinkable ten years ago have somehow been folded into our understanding of ourselves and our home, and we all move forward, more or less, with an even keel. Resilience and grief, change and memory, ever forward, ever forward.

Fifteen miles

2011-09-10T23:17:00.001-04:00

Fifteen-mile run today, enough of a distance to make me feel proud and want to tell other people about it. Three five-mile loops in Central Park, which was almost immediately boring. I listened to music, thought about work and family, thought about the act of running: what each muscle and joint was doing, how far I had traveled, how much farther to go, always calculating times and percentages. When I am in the middle of a grueling run I tell myself that I have already completed it, that the act of wanting is the same as achieving. "Action is intention," I repeat to myself, and somehow it works well enough.

Starting around the halfway point today the uphill segments of the run began to feel unusually grueling. The slightest change in slope would threaten to wreck me. I was generous with the walking breaks, but it got to be extremely difficult. I was hungry and wanted to sleep. My proudest moment was during my final ascent up the Great Hill, when I maintained a running pace up the entire thing when every fiber of my body wanted to stop and walk. A small victory over myself.

I was fairly useless for much of the day after that. I came home and showered and went to Chipotle for some protein and carbs. L left the bed unmade for me so I could take a nap, but that felt indolent at two in the afternoon. I just took an ice bath and now my entire lower body is quivering, not in the good way.

I had to remind myself that the training process actually will make me stronger. Today it felt like these longer runs merely sap the energy and power that I already have, draining me of what I will need to complete the marathon. Today I saw two runners in particular whose t-shirts resonated with me: the first,"Running sucks"; but then the second: "If you're still sweating, you're still alive." Amen to that.

Status updates

2011-09-01T20:31:00.001-04:00

Today I was walking along on the street when I inadvertently stepped on a Capri Sun juice thing on the ground, causing a stream of liquid to shoot through the straw and across some girl's thighs and butt. She was audibly shocked, and started gasping and looking around. I had to explain that I had stepped on a juice box, apologize profusely, and walk the hell away as fast as possible.

Also today I went to get a haircut, and the woman cutting my hair said to me, "How much do you want on top, well you don't have much on top, heh heh." Only women barbers say things like this. And yet I tipped her.

I didn't see much of L last weekend, because of the hurricane. And I haven't seen much of my family either, because work has been crazy. This is one of the most hectic weeks of the entire academic year, as we launch a new academic year and welcome the new students. There are moments when we participate in the life of the school community, when the students' youth and naivete erupts in moments of genuine enthusiasm and gratitude, that are actually quite moving. And then there are moments when I have pull back the reins on my irritation, such as when students march directly into my office without invitation and start talking at me, or when I receive an email from someone with a completely inscrutable email address who doesn't sign their message. "Who sent this email to me?" I replied back, before I could stop myself.

I have been a negligent marathon trainee, I regret to report. For the first time ever, I missed my long run last weekend because of hurricane-related childcare responsibilities. I only had time for one early-morning three mile run this week. And I don't know if I'll get in a long run this weekend. But then I will get back on track.

But tomorrow: we are packing up a rental car and driving to Rehoboth. A couple of days at the beach, a couple of days to introduce Alice to important things like Funland and Grotto Pizza and Browseabout Books. Jumping in the waves. Walking in the cool evening sand. The cry of the seagulls, ice cream on the boardwalk. It's important that she knows this.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-26T22:39:00.000-04:00

The city is freaking out about Hurricane Irene. It was a beautiful day today but there was a nervous energy in the street; the sidewalks seemed more crowded than usual, the lines at drugstores and groceries snaking down the aisles. People clutching bottled water, toilet paper. I went to five stores looking for D batteries to no avail.

My wife the civil servant is in Brooklyn tonight. She is part of the city's emergency response team, working 12 hour shifts at an evacuation center in Brooklyn. Hopefully I'll see her tonight before she has to report again for duty tomorrow. Once the city's transit system has shuddered to a halt tomorrow afternoon, I'm not sure how she'll be able to come back home from Brooklyn. So when does my wife come home?

The idea of going through a hurricane with just me and Alice, without L, is boggling and ridiculous. I am very proud of my wife for the work she does and the spirit she brings to her job. I hope she understands that she is doing important, humane work. But her absence tonight - and presumably, through this long weekend of emergency - baffles me.

I found some batteries at home and we have one good flashlight. I pulled aside candles and matches. We have enough food, I guess, and milk and water. Water bottles in the freezer. I guess we are almost ready, with almost everything.

The vise

2011-08-10T23:09:00.000-04:00

I have been uncharacteristically worried lately about the state of things in our life (and that's saying something). L and I have had some big talks about our family, our careers, our home, and our finances, trying to find the best way to manage everything in a sustainable way, a way that will keep us on a good path to prosperity. In some ways I feel like the same few questions are constantly swirling around us, and each passing day pushes us towards an answer. Can we stay in New York? Can we stay where we are? Does our life require changes, large or small? (The questions are more specific in my mind, of course, but they thunder down to the same basic propositions.) I worry about making a choice. I worry about not making a choice -- that our inaction will lead us to an answer in itself, an answer we may not want.

Sometimes I wonder if we are somehow being selfish, living in Manhattan and raising a family here. Is it stupid to try to do this? Does it matter that we still live in New York, since we are not exactly regulars on Broadway or at the museums? Are we trying to accomplish something best left to the financiers and their dowager mothers-in-law? Perhaps worse: are we the last ones left at the party, still toughing it out in Manhattan while so many of our friends have cycled in and out of the city? And yet so much of our life is grounded in the structures of urban living -- walking to playgrounds, enjoying the parks, living in a certain kind of community. I fear that if we lived someplace surburban, we would enjoy the luxuries of the 'burbs for a few months until we woke up in horror one day, realizing: I am bored. And then it would spiral downwards, Revolutionary Road-style. (Not to say that city life is inherently better or more exciting; just that it has clearly become our preference.)

If I think about these questions hard enough, it feels like the floor gives way under my feet, and all of the structures we have created to organize our life - the jobs, the childcare, the commute, the apartment, the friendships - are ripped to shreds in a single thoughtless moment, and the stark precarious nature of this balance emerges. Yet does life ever become more solid than this? What exactly could I expect someplace else?

I hit the point a few days ago where I just grew weary of worrying. We had a good talk with my folks about things, and I feel like we're doing the best we can. We are not sitting back passively and letting the circumstances of life dictate our fates; we are doing everything we can to best protect and support our lives. Beyond that I don't know what else can be done, besides work on my patience and serenity. Like I was saying to L tonight: I'm worried something will happen. And I'm also worried something won't.

At some point, I have to take a breath and just stop worrying.

Photo: my favorite monkey at the Manhattan Children's Museum.

Like the wind

2011-07-21T23:40:00.001-04:00

I've had a really good running week. For the last three mornings I've woken up at 6 a.m. (sacrificing an invaluable 45 minutes of sleep) to go for a run before heading to work -- 3 miles, 4 miles, 3 miles. Despite the disgusting heat, which feels like a thick soggy curtain laying on top of the city, the runs have been pretty good. My times are where I want them to be and my body is slowly creaking into action. This is definitely the most exercise I've gotten in a while, and the only way I was able to do it for the week was with L dropping off Alice for two of those mornings. We'll see what the coming weeks bring.

The downside of my athletic triumph, of course, is that I am exhausted and ravenous all the time. At work, at approximately 3:30 or so each day, I find myself skulking around the office looking for a snack to eat -- some kind of leftovers offered for public consumption or something I can poach without incident. Like a pathetic woodland creature doomed to die in the winter, I usually find nothing. I have also been extremely tired all week. Last night we were reading when I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and had to excuse myself to the bedroom to take a nap. It was eight p.m., and this was distressing. I woke up at nine feeling very discombobulated.

Tonight I'm celebrating tomorrow's rest day by staying up for a thrilling evening of "The Real Housewives of New York." I don't have to run tomorrow. I just have to navigate the heat, and try to combat the self-loathing that comes from watching too much Bravo. And that sounds great to me.

Photo: Alice trying on my running shoes after I returned home on Wednesday morning

Harry Potter

2011-07-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

Today I saw the last Harry Potter movie. It was excellent, and I greatly enjoyed it. I read the books as they all came out, but I am not an expert in the intricacies of wand lore and things like that. I came to the movie as a mere novice, but that was enough.

I was surprised at the strength of the movie's emotional impact. The overall story has unfolded in enough time and with enough stateliness to allow it to gather some real heft and meaning. This is ultimately the story of an orphaned boy and his long, painful process of understanding his parents and the world they lived in. The passions and jealousies that animated them and their peers.

What's strange to me now is how much I relate to the parents. Seeing Harry's ghostly parents promise him, in his hour of greatest danger, that they would be with him -- that they were always with him -- struck a deep chord. Ever since Alice was born I have been grappling with this new emotional force, the instant and primal love that propels so much of what I do nowadays, in one way or another. My mom told me, "You will kill for your kids," and boy, was she right. (Mrs. Weasley cursing the witch who was attempting to kill her daughter, moments before she dispatched her nemesis into the great beyond: "Not my daughter, you bitch!" Now I understand.) It's interesting to me to track my own experience with Harry Potter over the last decade or so, watching the easy, thoughtless narcissism of adolescence slough away, later to be replaced by the sweet, gnawing ache of parental love. It is about Harry and his gifts, but it's also about the ones who placed him there. The whole story changes.

Blueberry festival 2011

2011-07-18T22:16:00.000-04:00

We spent this past weekend in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to visit James and attend the Blueberry Festival. I knew Alice would get a kick out of it and sure enough she did -- she was very enamored with the animals at the petting zoo (the ducklings, the fuzzy things I presume were chickens, the goats, the cows, the pigs) and she enjoyed watching a wood turner craft little wooden tops on a lathe. She also enjoyed the man who played old coal country songs on his guitars, songs that struck a sweet, poignant note to me -- I appreciate these dashes of northeastern Pennsylvania culture. Other highlights included the inevitable bossy woman who told us how we should be raising Alice -- "Put a hat on her! She needs a hat!" -- as well as the woman who intercepted Alice when she was walking around and took her by the hand until we popped up to retrieve our child from this well-meaning but completely unnecessary mini-abduction.

It was nice to see our girl trundling through the grass and eating bits of blueberry pie a la mode. She loved watching the horses as they trotted around the dirt area behind the barn; with all of the animals, she would creep closer and closer, an arm outstretched towards them, until the beast made any kind of quick motion -- some sniff or snort -- and then Alice would startle and shuffle backwards to the safety of her parents. Until it was time to investigate once again.

Thank you James for the photos...

Marathon training, week 1

2011-07-11T17:03:00.001-04:00

Last week was the first week of marathon training! Overall, successful. I ran three miles on Tuesday evening, which was very unpleasant -- hot, soupy weather and clothing that felt too tight. I am aiming for an 8:30 pace (last time around I ran at 8:55) and I ended up clocking these three at 8:26, so that was nice. Wednesday and Thursday turned out to be "rest days," because I didn't want to/couldn't run, so that's fine.

On Saturday I had my first long run -- six miles, which is not bad at all. Just one good loop around Central Park. I was hurting a little bit from the late dinner with friends we had enjoyed the night before, and I realized that there was a road race also going on that morning. I pictured myself being devoured by an avalanche of thousands of runners in matching bibs, but through some miracle of geography and pacing I managed to avoid the entire pack. I would pass mile markers and realize that the race had been going for 20 minutes already, and then 30, and yet I never got lapped and I eventually reached the tail end of the pack. The goal with the long runs is to run slow, so my mantra was "slow and in control." Yet at the end I realized that I was running 8:45. It was a nice run -- stately, elegant, almost matronly.

Then finally Sunday was cross-training, after another late night of "Horrible Bosses" and $9 pitchers (plural) or of Rolling Rock. After almost five hours of sleep I staggered to the gym for the R. & B./gospel spin class I have come to love, along with some weights.

In class we were listening to something ("To Worship You I Live" or "God Favored Me," I forget) with the resistance on the bike near its maximum -- pushing the pedals required such effort, such rhythm to keep moving -- leaning into it, heart beating steadily, sweat along my arms, shirt stuck on my back, eyes stinging. The song was rising to a crescendo and the instructor started telling us, "Let go of the resistance. Let go of the opposition. Rise to the top of the hill. The top of the hill is waiting for you." And I started picturing L and A at the top of the hill, waiting for me in their golden light, waiting for me to move through all of this to reach them. I don't know if it was the physical strain or my exhaustion or the music or the words, but I almost got a little emotional in that spin class. Finally the song reach its peak and the instructor slowly brought us back to the bikes, to the small room, to the stinging and the sweat. The moment had ended and we all looked up and around the studio, wiping the sweat out of our eyes, preparing for the next stage of the ride.

CruiseLand

2011-07-06T15:06:00.001-04:00

Going on a cruise around the western and southern coasts of Spain entails two trips. On the one hand, you go to Spain. On the other, you go on a cruise ship. I naively expected the cruise to be somewhat Spanish – paella at dinner, sangria in the afternoon – but the cruise ship is a culture unto itself: English-speaking, abundant and plush, non-threatening, as boisterous as a seven-day wedding reception. It’s CruiseLand!

CruiseLand is mostly populated by old Europeans, mainly English – round, burnt-pink people, shuffling along the corridors, moving with a grim determination to the buffet spreads. They wake up early to begin baking on deck chairs under the unadulterated Mediterranean sun, or they gather in long queues to collect their baked beans at breakfast. On formal nights they emerge from their cabins in tuxedos and gowns – tuxedos and gowns! Packed away on a cruise ship! – to eat the delicious three-course meal in the dining hall and then settle in for more drinks around the boat. The ideal cruise ship would not have any stairs; there would merely be ramps sloping downwards, from the upper decks with the swimming pools and nightclubs and unused jogging track, all the way to a series of troughs and buffet lines and bars. The old English sunbirds could roll or shuffle or zoom along in their motorized carts (plenty of those onboard), smiling broadly and saying “excuse us, pet,” as they tumble on down to feed.

L and I quickly realized that we occupied a demographic black hole on this ship: early thirties, americanos, with a baby. In addition to the elderly European crowd, there were a number of sloshed twenty-somethings – friendly, game United Kingdom kids who could always be relied on to volunteer for the ship beauty pageant or sexiest man contest or nightly karaoke (I myself performed a 1990s N’Sync hit at karaoke one night and received a warm reception from the Irish lasses). These cool young kids seemed to be drunk much of the time, and were having fun in their flamboyantly obnoxious way. How we envied them! There were other young families on the boat, but being European, they had weird customs we could not adopt. At midnight they could be found in the bars, their stroller parked beside them, their bonny wee tot sleeping peacefully inside. There’s nothing like being in a bar on a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, surrounded by old Europeans in wheelchairs and young Europeans in strollers, listening to an outer-borough piano man bang away at “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” Viva Espana!

The hallmark of CruiseLand was aggressive hospitality and good cheer. I distinctly remember crossing an empty atrium at seven in the morning, not a soul to be found, while “La Bamba” blasted gaily through the speakers. At meals, attendants and waiters would approach us bearing gifts of strawberries and napkin animals for Alice. People would pat her, tickle her, hug her, pick her up, with barely a glance at us. It took a day or two to become acclimated to this life: the endless food, the available drinks, the towels, the dinners, the tuxedos, the karaoke, the internet by the minute, the champagne bar, the spa, the lack of care or context. The small grace of falling to sleep each night listening to the waves breaking off the hull of the ship.

Seven days in CruiseLand wasn’t enough time. Not even close.

State update: Massachusetts

2011-06-13T17:08:00.000-04:00

I spent most of last week at a conference in Boston, a city I haven't visited in an extremely long time. It was unexpectedly lovely -- amidst the usual unpredictable cruelty of Massachusetts weather, we enjoyed a beautiful summer evening on my first night in town. I went for a run on a route traced out for me by the hotel: from Boston Common along Cambridge Street, across Longfellow Bridge and along the Charles River, then crossing back over on Harvard Bridge and running along the Esplanade back to Cambridge -- a nice four-mile loop. As I ran, I kept thinking, "I am not in New York, these are not New Yorkers, this is another city where people live. And it is beautiful here." Sunset over the water, sailboats bobbing along. Brilliant office towers reflecting the orange-yellow light. Running blindly and confidently.

One evening I abandoned the conference program to visit with my grandparents and aunt in nearby Beverly. I was proud of myself for navigating the commuter train and making it to the Beverly Depot, where I had a great summer dinner with my aunt and grandfather (steak, grilled out in the spitting rain; salad, potato salad, sliced tomato (first good one of the year), brownie and ice cream, Bud Light) and then went on to the hospital where my grandmother was unfortunately checked in. It had been five years since I had seen this side of the family, and being with them again felt easy and familiar. I saw unexpected glimpses of my dad in my aunt's features or my grandfather's gestures. Their home was full of pictures of my sister and me, Alice and L. I felt like I had discovered some kind of reservoir of love, and I felt horrible and strange about letting so much time pass between visits. It was wonderful, but it came with a certain ache, too. I called L when I was standing on the dark, rainy platform, waiting for the train to arrive to roll me through the night back to Boston, but we could barely talk before the flashing lights and clatter of the train roared into the station.

Another train ride and a few days later, and now I'm back at home.

Neighbors

2011-06-05T23:36:00.001-04:00

This morning at 8:30, I was walking out of the apartment to head to the gym, untangling my headphones in my hands, when I heard our next-door neighbor yelling for help inside his apartment. "Help me! Help me! Is anyone there? Please help me!" I continued walking down the first flight of stairs before I stopped and came back up. I called to him through the door. From what I could understand, he said he had been stuck in his bathtub for two days, and could I go to the superintendent and get the keys to his apartment. I said I would. I went downstairs and knocked on the super's door, and got no response. I called him and left a voice message. I knocked on my neighbor's door and he started yelling again -- "Help! Someone, please!" -- and his voice faltered. He must have thought I had left.

I conferred with L and we decided to call the police. She called 911 and spoke to the operators. Soon other neighbors had gathered with us outside of his door: the neighbor who was the reason we called 911 the last time, a girl doing her laundry. When the police arrived at the building, they buzzed our neighbor's apartment to be let in, which struck me as grimly hilarious. Key in hand, the superintendent came spilling out of the elevator with the cops and EMTs. Everyone went inside the apartment. We hung back, afraid to look through the doorway. They were worried about what kind of mess they might find.

A few minutes later they rolled our neighbor out in a rickety wheelchair that looked like lawn furniture. He was wrapped from head to toe in a white bedsheet, with his skinny legs dangling and his gnarled feet dragging on the floor tile. He was every figure of the Pieta. His body was bisected by bright orange straps tied tightly to secure him. They asked him his name and if he knew his social. Soon he and the police and EMTs had all vanished back down the elevator. L said, "Should we wish him good luck?," but by the time we tried to say it they had already gone. Before they left one of the cops made sure his lights and air conditioner were turned off.

A few of us were still on the landing. The super said he didn't mind helping our neighbor. He was old and alone, and not all there. Lou Gehrig's disease. From our apartment we can hear him playing classical music most of the time, and yelling to himself when he gets frustrated.

In the afternoon we saw the neighbor from the last 911 call, who said he was going to the hospital to check on the man. Since he's all alone, you know. But before he left for the hospital, our neighbor had to check the building directory posted by the buzzer to make sure he knew the man's last name.

Alice update

2011-05-22T12:08:00.000-04:00

What has she been up to?

Walking confidently. Starting to mangle words into something coherent: "Mama" and the like are pretty solid. References to me include: "Dada," "Didi," "Dee," and sometimes "Gagy." She is pretty good with "Shoe." She seemed to be on the brink of "Cheese" this morning. Recently, during our morning bus rides, she has been insisting on sitting in her own seat next to me, her shoes reaching the lip of the seat, her head leaning downward on her chest. This is reminiscent of one of her favorite perches at home, resting against all of the pillows on our bed (we call it Mt. Pillow, as she enjoys climbing it). She likes to splay out, reclining with her belly out and her legs crossed daintily. When I see her do this I see a streak of laziness and indolence that I know came from me.

She loves gnawing on her toothbrush, although she is resistant to let anyone actually brush her teeth. She gets upset when L tries to change her diaper, but she's calm when I do it. Now that the weather is nicer and I'm wearing shorts around the house, she is very interested in my legs. Earlier this week, we lost one of her shoes for two days because she had put it in the recycling bin, and we couldn't find it. For Easter, my parents got her one of those storybooks where you can record your voice reading the text. Yesterday I opened it up and my parents' voices started reading the story out loud, and Alice walked over and sat in my lap and listened to the whole story. Lately she has been enjoying drawing at her little white table, and she figured out how to lift one leg to get herself up into the chair. The other night on the walk home, she stopped to wave at some people drinking at the bar, who waved back, and then she clapped for herself and waved again.

A genius, our girl.

Jury duty

2011-05-22T11:53:00.000-04:00

I was on jury duty this week. Unlike my first time as a juror, six years ago, this experience felt a lot more...coerced. I felt like I had been conscripted into something unpleasant. At every step of the way, people reminded us that it was our duty to be there, that it was an inconvenience, that we may be occupied for the next several weeks, that they would let us go as soon as possible but not yet, and that the fate of our democracy depended on our presence in the sad little waiting room. It was like a hostage situation, but more principled.

I had two close brushes with juryhood. The first case was an attempted assault. Someone was accused of beating a Christmas tree vendor with a bicycle chain. The second case was a murder and at attempted murder. That trial would last several weeks. The death penalty would not be an issue before us. We were not to look up this case on the Internet. There had been media attention before, and there would likely be more attention to come. Can we handle that?

Well, I guess I could, probably, but it's not really a good time for me to spend a month as a juror. Not when we're going to Spain and already got Alice a passport, a hellish process involving four post offices in two states. When I made this excuse before the judge I felt very spineless and pathetic, whimpering my way out of jury service. I was excused and sent to a different room upstairs where I got my letter stating that I was done with jury service until 2017, which so far is convenient for me.

Last week was exhausting, with graduation activities and jury duty. This coming week I have two work retreats, and the slow transition into the summer season of the academic calendar. I'm also trying to submit a story to a few publications/contests with a May 31 deadline, so that should keep me occupied too.

Writing/running

2011-05-05T15:32:00.000-04:00

My beloved writing class ended this week. When it's all said and done I have one brand new story I'm really excited about, one new story I'm worried might be a noble failure and a set of revisions/suggestions for a third story in draft form. My plan for the summer is to work on revisions for the latter two stories, and maybe try to submit the first story and see if I get any bites (and of course try to kick around some new ideas). One lesson from the class: writing requires discipline and regularity. I need to be better about writing consistently throughout the week, rather than binging for a few harried, exhausting nights in a row.

I had been planning on trying to take the next-level workshop in the fall, until I learned that I have somehow won a spot in the lottery for this year's New York City marathon. So now I think my fall will be devoted to running the marathon. When I did it in 2007 (copiously recorded on this blog) it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. Back then I had to run 10 races in the preceding year in order to guarantee my spot; this year I fell into it through the dumb luck of a random drawing. I think I could use this kind of long-range goal, this kind of physical challenge; something to remind me that I'm more than a brain with an email account. (Plus, this year I can actually take ice baths after my long runs, since we now have a bathtub.)

I don't think I can swing a writing class as well as marathon training. That's one too many selfish endeavors for someone who is still trying to do a good job at work and be an equal partner at home. I'm excited to get some good writing done over the summer -- this is the year of writing, after all -- but the jolt of this marathon entry is an opportunity I can't ignore. Not this year.

I got my ass kicked at a writing workshop

2011-04-20T00:11:00.001-04:00

Last night my second and final story got workshopped in my beginning fiction class. I had been very excited about this; my first story was well-received, and I tried to really amp up the work this time around. I was trying to be ambitious and worldly, to move around chronologically and write two interweaving stories, one when the protagonist is 15 and one when he is 45. I was trying to write in a non-linear way about a character who was not a carbon copy of me at the present moment. Enough of these short stories that take place within a few hours, when some protagonist who is the demographic equivalent of the author experiences some precious little epiphany. I wanted to be narratively bold and sophisticated, to tackle some big themes. When I passed out my story for the class to read, I was pretty proud of myself, and I thought that it had turned out well for a first draft, although obviously it needed a lot of work.

Well, unfortunately, as the workshop got under way, things were not looking so hot. The conversation zoomed in immediately on the weak spots of the piece. "Uneven" was the adjective that really set the tone for the discussion of the story. I concentrated on taking copious notes, to avoid having to look at anyone as we all discussed my stilted dialogue, or how the tone was too even, or how there should be more anger. As time passed I kept hoping for the conversation to move on to other elements (how about that sophisticated chronology? did anyone catch how narratively bold I'm being?) but we remained mired in the bad parts. As someone who is bad at hiding my emotions, I think it was pretty obvious that I was deflating. By the end of the conversation, the instructor was noting that although the class discussion had focused on the problematic areas, there was a lot in the piece that worked very well -- and then he quickly went through a laundry list of good things. But the damage was done.

I felt like a real jackass for being so proud and happy about the work. I was embarrassed at having talked to the instructor about how excited I was to get feedback from the class. I tried to pull myself out of my funk for the rest of the session, but I couldn't manage it -- I didn't say a word for the rest of class. I felt like I had left my guts on the page, that I had dug really deep and put myself out there, and that I had just gotten shat on for my efforts. I wanted to pause in the conversation and ask: "So did anyone like anything about it? Did anything work for anyone?" But of course you can't do that in a writing class, where workshop protocol is as sacred and inviolable as, say, the procedure for selecting a new Pope.

I had a long, redemptive, enjoyable conference with the instructor afterwards. He said my impression of the conversation was probably a lot worse than it actually had been. This could very well be true. When I got home I read everyone's written critiques, and suddenly there it was -- proof that the story was not the abject failure I had thought. People appreciated different elements of it, and found it moving in different ways, and said some really nice and thoughtful things about it. Great.

Although I still feel dumb and embarrassed for letting myself be so crushed by all of this, I am still licking my wounds over the whole thing. I have to put that particular story aside for a while and work on some other stuff for the time being. Part of this is vanity, and part of it is the need for constructive criticism to come bundled with something good, something I can hang on to. When in doubt, blame astrology -- I'm a Pisces, and I'm sensitive about my shit.

Happy birthday, Alice

2011-04-06T22:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Alice's first birthday. The main festivities took place on Saturday, when we somehow wedged about 30 people into our apartment (the crowd included six or eight children). Alice, looking like a confection in her pink sequined birthday dress, took it all in stride. We ordered a box-full of Chipotle burritos and hung up some pink and green streamers. There were balloons. Everyone who came was really nice and excited to see the baby. Before we had birthday cake I gave a little mini-speech about What It All Means, then we sang and Alice devoured her first bites of chocolate, quickly developing a dark brown goatee of frosting around her lips.

After it was all over -- after the guests had left, after our family members had decamped for their hotels in New Jersey -- we were exhausted. We were consigned to eat leftover burritos for the next six meals or so. A fitting coda to the night: Alice throwing up her cake and continuing to vomit sporadically all evening; an unopened bottle of wine somehow falling out of the refrigerator and shattering on the kitchen floor.

It's hard to believe it's been a year since Alice came into our lives. My memories of that day and the days that followed are so vivid, I can't believe we've gone through a whole year of seasons, changes, holidays. Like a friend told me today, with children the days are long and the years are short. I feel like my whole orientation towards life has changed since she was born -- what I consider important or meaningful, how I value my time, where I want to direct my energy and resources.

If it's hard to believe a year has passed, it's also difficult to overstate the joy she's brought into our lives. Tonight at dinner we were playing a little game where we were feeding each other Cheerios. I would open my mouth in an exaggerated way and say "aah" so that she could place the Cheerio inside. She opened her mouth to mimic me, and said "aah" in the exact same tone. She had never done that before. Then she would touch my finger with her finger and we would spend a few moments considering fingers. All of these little tiny doors opening, connections being forged, ideas linking together. It's like you can see her memories sharpening, her smiles becoming more genuine, her sense of herself and our family becoming more clear. It's still miraculous.

Long run

2011-04-04T23:15:00.001-04:00

Yesterday my brother-in-law Henry and I went on an epic run down the west side of Manhattan, from my apartment at 125th Street all the way to Battery Park. It ultimately clocked in at over 9 miles, by far the longest run I've done since the marathon. It was a beautiful day, clear and breezy, and there were plenty of other runners and bikers keeping us company. It felt great to run beyond my usual uptown route, to then explore uncharted new parks along the Upper West Side and midtown, and to conclude the run along the familiar downtown stretches of the Hudson River Park. I felt buoyant during those last couple of miles -- I haven't run down there since we moved uptwon, and it really felt like a homecoming.

We ran at a nice leisurely place, so I was never too uncomfortable. Only one of my headphones worked, but I got used to it after a while. My legs were tired but I didn't experience any alarming pains. A few stitches in my side, but nothing too bad. Afterwards I was exhausted for the rest of the afternoon, but no worse for the wear, and even now I don't have any sharp pains or discomfort. All in all, it was a really great experience -- a great discovery that I can still do things I might not have thought I could. Good stuff.

911

2011-03-30T00:21:00.000-04:00

L arrived home late from work, around 9. I had put the baby down and had ordered a pizza for us. L had just walked in and was standing in the doorway of the apartment, talking to a woman in the hallway. The woman was wearing baggy gray longjohns, clutching a cordless phone and her eyeglasses and a pen. Apparently her boyfriend, who lives with her, was drunk and raging. He had smashed his hand through some glass case in their apartment and was bleeding. He had locked her out.

L invited her inside to have a place to think for a few minutes. The woman said she just wanted him out of her apartment, but she didn't want the police involved. She came in and stood in our doorway for a few minutes, then returned to the hallway. We offered to call the police but she declined. The woman suggested that maybe we could ask him to come into our apartment for a few moments, and then she could return to her apartment and lock him out. We said no.

The man opened the door to his apartment and started yelling at her again. He moved into the hallway, bleary-eyed. L, the sentinel, held our door open in case the woman needed it. The man was blathering on and on. He started referring to us and pointing to us. "Now my neighbor won't even talk to me!" He started comparing himself to Libya, saying it would take more than one policeman to take him down. He talked about the Irish. Staring at L's face to not look at the man's, I kept asking her: should we call the police now? Are we justified now? Finally, feeling vaguely threatened as he shuffled into the middle of the hallway, closer to the woman and our door, I called 911. Not the first time I've done it, here in this city of shit and blood. I put on a fleece and some flip flops to get ready.

A few minutes later I heard distant sirens, then three cruisers pulled up in front of our building. A group of policemen swarmed inside. Someone from dispatch called me to tell me to buzz them up. When they poured out of the elevator I gestured to the poor woman who was standing forlornly by the stair railing, and they directed their procedures and protocols at her. One officer, calm and low-voiced, hung back to talk to me about the call.

A little while later I got another call from dispatch, telling me to buzz up the ambulance crew. I also thought, where is our pizza? It's been thirty minutes. Maybe the law enforcement can let our pizza guy in. The ambulance crew had arrived because the man was apparently bleeding from the broken glass he had smashed. A little while later we heard yelling from outside -- it was the man, now on the sidewalk, surrounded by cops trying to secure him onto a gurney to go into the ambulance. He was hollering, howling at them. Craning out of our window we could see him thrashing on the ground, the lumpy mounds of the officers' backs surrounding him. Someone was pinning him to the ground with a knee. Suddenly I saw our pizza delivery guy, toodling along on his bike up the block, past the spectacle of double-parked law enforcement vehicles with their lights ablaze. "Well, at least the pizza's here."

A few minutes later the man was secured in the ambulance and the cars dispersed. His antics made me feel more justified in calling 911 in the first place. The cars and ambulance revved up their lights and sirens to facilitate illegal U-turns on our block, and then they were screaming up Broadway, away from our home.

The pizza was lukewarm and doughy when we finally ate it. We wondered what it would be like when the man inevitably returned to his apartment, to the woman in longjohns. The city is a forceful, unrelenting place on nights like this. Discretion, or the opportunity to ignore your neighbor, is a luxury. What were we supposed to do? Wait for the woman to get hit? Wait for the drunken man to sober up, stop bleeding, stop pounding on the walls?

What if we had just closed our door?

Awesome Friday/[Law firm] Saturday

2011-03-19T23:50:00.000-04:00

Really good weekend so far:

On Friday I took a half-day of vacation and left work early to go for a long run in the park. I had bought new sneakers earlier in the week (I endured the full treatment to get the appropriate shoe, running on the treadmill with my dress pants ludicrously cuffed upwards while in loaner sneakers, and noticing on the playback video a disturbing outward kick at the rear point in my stride, leading to possibly an even more gangly form that I thought I had, so that now I'm concerned I run like a Muppet) and I was ready to go.

I did a solid six mile loop in Central Park without any stops or water breaks. I was happy with this, simply for the endurance factor. The weather was glorious and it was a great afternoon to run. The Park felt familiar and challenging, and by the end of the run I was happy that my leg muscles were killing me, but I was ok cardio-wise. At home I found that I had a massive blister under a pinkie toe, but hopefully this is just a casualty of brand-new running shoes. I showered and headed to Chipotle for some lunch along with Entertainment Weekly and the New Yorker, and then I went and sat in the sun in Riverside Park and continued reading. The sun was warm and plenty of people were walking by. I read a great short story in the New Yorker by Ben Marcus that really captured one part of fatherhood, the part where you love your child and are confounded by her at the same time, and the part where you realize you are still a lazy bastard but it's not as easy to indulge in it anymore.

We had dinner at J&A's, some great pasta with wine and sambuca. A wonderful evening -- we ended up waking up Alice to take her home around midnight, and she was exhausted but peaceable in the taxi. It was a really great day.

And today was the one-year anniversary of my last day at my previous job. My friends have been very excited about this day, and we were able to observe it last night, around the fourth glass of wine. Not a day goes by that I don't think about my last job and what I learned from there. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, many levels of pride and disappointment. As it recedes further into the past I'm able to appreciate the experience in different ways, and the passage of time has really been a blessing in may ways.

In any event, I was reading the March 2010 entries in ol' Clarity and realizing that this period of time last year was extremely consequential. March 19: last day of work! March 24: first day of work! April 5: baby is born! What a season that was. Thank God it's over, and that we emerged unscathed, baby in arms.

Alice at Chipotle

2011-03-17T23:50:00.000-04:00

Last night I left work in a foul mood. I had planned on taking a break at some point in the afternoon and grabbing a Coke, but I was unexpectedly busy and spent the hours watching the window of opportunity close before me. I was resentful of the amount of work I had to do over spring break, when the office is a ghost town yet my own little shop keeps humming along.

I had to pick up Alice, and on my way to get her I thought, F it, I'm taking her to Chipotle. Even though she's been around for almost a year now I still feel weirdly not-autonomous with her. Like I can't just decide to take her places, that I should be asking L for permission, or that we have to head immediately home if we don't have a fully stocked diaper bag with complete sets of extra clothing and outerwear. Perhaps this stems from the nasty old cow on the bus who made a comment about how Alice wasn't wearing shoes or a hat one morning. Turns out none of her toes froze off, heifer! Thanks for your concern!

Anyways, I took Alice to Chipotle and we had a great time. I managed to carry our tray of food, plus her, plus a high chair. I managed to fill our drinks, sit her down, and enjoy a snack of chips and guac and a quesadilla. She was laughing and babbling the whole time and only nearly choked to death once. Overall, a wild success.

She is in this painfully cute stage right now. She does this thing where she runs her tongue side to side, along the edges of her teeth, making this wonderful burbling sound like this: BllBllBllBllBll. So of course now I make the noise to her, and she'll make it to me. I made the noise to L once when the two of us were lying on the couch, just because I kind of forgot. On the walk home from Chipotle Alice was making the noise contentedly, smiling at anyone, craning her neck upwards to look at the sky, reaching in the elevator to poke at the buttons, happy to walk around the apartment with my assistance, euphoric to be playing hide and seek and finding me in such sophisticated hiding spots as on the other side of the bed or behind a door.

I read somewhere that the first year or two of parenthood is about drawing your child close to you, and the rest of it is letting your child go. I am trying to be aware of and appreciate this moment of drawing her near, welcoming her to our fold, and seeing her light up in the midst of it all.

Night clapping

2011-03-07T23:29:00.001-05:00

Last night L was in Atlanta for work, so it was just LB and me on the home front. She had been fussy in the evening and it took her an extra hour to fall asleep. She woke up around 11 and 12, but quickly whimpered herself back to sleep both times. I considered this a personal victory.

She woke up again around 1:45 in the morning, with a shrill, insistent cry. I slugged myself out of sleep and went in to see her. She was inconsolable, not hungry or wet. She missed her mama. We walked around the apartment for a few minutes, then I just decided to let her fall asleep in bed with me. I set up some pillows so she couldn't roll off and the tried to demonstrate how to fall asleep. I approached this task with a sense of willful optimism, knowing it probably wouldn't work anyway, but hoping that she would fall asleep calmly beside me; that I would successfully fight the urge to roll over away from her; that she would not crawl or roll right over the edge of the bed.

She was so tired, my girl, and the night was so thick around us. She stared at me with large brown eyes as the pacifier bobbed in her mouth. She put her hands on my face and tried to hide in the crook of my neck. She lay on my chest. She rested her head on my belly and stretched her legs out like she was staring at the stars. She would lie comfortably for a little while, then huff and reposition herself. I rubbed her back and tried to calm her. She sprawled next to me with a hand on my arm. She rested her head on the pillow and stared at me from mere inches away. The corners of her eyes shading in a familiar smile.

I feigned sleep and she sat up and murmured to herself. She clapped her hands a few times. She looked at me and placed a hand on my cheek. She clapped her hands again.

I felt fortunate to see her night behaviors up close like this. It felt like watching a wild animal in its natural habitat. My nocturnal kid. After an hour it was evident that sleep was not likely for either of us. I picked her up and we walked around the apartment for a bit. We moseyed into her room and she leaned down towards her crib. I placed her in it and she lay down peacefully. I returned to bed, deconstructed the pillow walls I had built to protect her, and soon enough sleep had claimed us both.

Posture

2011-03-04T17:35:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I was at the gym on Sunday morning, like I do, and was half-heartedly lifting some weights on the machines while waiting for my awesome R&B/gospel spinning class to start. A trainer approached me and pointed out how I was using the machines incorrectly, then he said he could show me some moves that might be better the next week. Ok fine, I said.

The following Sunday (last Sunday) I found the trainer and he put me through the paces, to the point where I was still sore four days later. The highlight was when he said I had really good form with squats.

The unfortunate part, though, came when I was doing dead lifts and he said my back wasn't flat enough. This turned into a broader discussion of posture, and how apparently I should be puffing my chest up and out at all times. (I tried this for a little bit at work and felt uncomfortable.) He gave me some stretches to do to improve my posture -- basically reverse-humping a doorframe, then repeating it three times -- and I've even altered my computer monitor and tried to be more conscientious about how I sit and stand.

At one point during the session he said, "Just wait, you'll see, when you stand up straight you'll get more respect at work, people will treat you differently."

I let this sit for a moment while I continued the painful stretch he had me holding for a minute. Finally I said, "Just so you know, I do get respect at work. It's not like I get picked on in the hallways or anything."

"Whoa whoa I don't even know you! I'm just saying, it makes a difference."

"Okay, I'm just saying. It's not like I'm getting beaten up at work."

So I have spent this last week trying to stand up straight, uncurl my spine, flatten my back. We'll see if it takes.

31

2011-02-25T17:35:00.000-05:00

[I'm actually writing this on March 4, but I'm posting it under 2/25/11 for the sake of posterity.]

On February 25 I turned 31. As I've said before, 30 was an extremely good year for me. The first part of this birthday was spent on the night of the 24th, celebrating on a boat called the Calypso Queen toodling around Tampa Bay. I was having an unexpectedly pleasant evening with colleagues -- cans of Bud Light, a DJ playing fun and laughable songs, the sun sinking far off into the Gulf. The Electric Slide. At one moment I was standing alone on the top deck, looking at the sky framed between two gaudily-decorated plastic palm trees, as a reggae song bounced in the air -- and for the first time in my life, I kind of liked reggae! For that brief moment, it made sense at the time!

Much of my actual birthday was spent in transit from Florida to home. We had a nice dinner at home, L made a delicious cake. On Saturday night we had a fun night at Nectar, partying like we were childless (almost), and then rushing home so we could stop the clock on the babysitter. When childcare costs loom over you just like the threat of a hangover -- that's what 31 is like, so far.

Encouragement

2011-02-24T20:24:00.000-05:00

I've been sending a story out to various literary journals, and getting a bunch of rejections in return. I'm fine with this. But today one of the rejection notes -- which, like most others, was tersely written and signed "The Editors" -- also came with this:

"P.S. I really enjoyed reading this piece."

The heart leaps.

Dateline: Clearwater

2011-02-23T23:42:00.001-05:00

I'm in Clearwater Beach, Florida, for a few days to attend a conference. The privilege of sleeping in a big pristine bed, uninterrupted by the cries of an anguished or surly ten month-old child, can't be overstated. But it's definitely a little lonely here. Today after 10 hours of conference activities I went for a walk on the beach -- jean cuffs rolled up, name tag discreetly folded over -- to watch the setting sun dissolve into the gulf. It was beautiful, and also melancholy. It reminded me of the solitude of my first year in New York, before L had arrived, when the city was the perfect place to languish in your loneliness.

Since my last post, things have gotten much better with Alice, thanks in part to some quality time we got to spend when L had to work late or early. The baby and I had a lot of fun clapping, playing, reading, eating, etc. She will now feed you a Cheerio or a morsel of some other food if you ask her, and reinforce the request by opening your mouth and aiming towards her food. I think this is the first real sign of generosity or compassion we've seen from her, and it's encouraging. She's also just a lot of fun right now, with her endearing wobbly movements, her vocalizations, and her overwhelming cuteness. I'm glad I'm back in the fold. (I would also note we went through a low point when she fell off the couch and landed on her forehead, then proceeded to flip over. I was a wreck on wheels that night, and being on Concussion Watch for the next two days wasn't fun either, but fortunately she is fine and doesn't hold a grudge.)

Not sure what else I have to say about Florida. I've been eating a lot of grouper and key lime pie. The people are friendly, and nice, and slow, and they seem unafflicted by the neuroses and chronic impatience that characterizes me and everyone I know. Like most other places I go, I look around at the white beaches, and the broad sky, and the sweet pace of life, and I ask myself, why not live here? Why not live and be happy here? It seems like it could work.

Two more days in Florida, then back home to my ladies. And my birthday. Not a bad week.

She's just not that into me

2011-02-16T15:30:00.000-05:00

We're in a depressing little trough where Alice is just not that into me. Not a lot of smiles, or interest, or engagement. What I hope will be cute or funny usually turn out to be annoying. I will try to tickle her or kiss on her stomach or something, and she tries to push me away, preening to the side to get away and find her mama. Oftentimes I'll be holding her and her neck is swiveling around, trying to find L. Once she spots her she lunges in her direction, grunting in a way that is one part whine and one part command, until I move close enough so that Alice can reach up to her. Our touching family moments now consistent of Alice hugging L, while I hold on to Alice's lower body. It's pretty pathetic.

I'm trying not to be bothered by this but it is frustrating. It reminds me of the period when the baby would be at her fussiest when I came home from work. To her credit, she has been fighting various viruses, infections and rashes for the better part of three weeks now, but I don't know what I have to do to get a smile around here. It's a little discouraging.

Writing class

2011-02-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

I'm now a couple weeks into the creative writing class I'm taking at the university. This is a Beginning Fiction Workshop, and, being the only non-undergrad in the room, I am the oldest student by about nine years. In fact, I graduated from college a year before the instructor did.

I remember, in college and grad school, what it was like when some weird, older person had somehow infiltrated the classroom. It was very off-putting: a reminder of mortality and the inevitable passage of time that would turn our bright, naive minds, as well as our taut undergraduate bodies, into something older and more weary. It was basically like the Grim Reaper had decided to enroll in the class.

Well, now that symbol of time and death is me, and I prefer to think of myself as an elder statesman. Perhaps it's because I feel fairly passionately about short stories and creative writing, but I find myself chomping at the bit to talk in class. To be fair, many of my proposed comments fall along the lines of: "John Cheever! Awesome!!" or "Alice Munro! I kind of named my daughter after her!" I wasn't like this when I was in college; now I'm just really excited to be there.

So far I have loved the stories we've read, and the chance to really dissect them in class. I've been familiar with much of the work we've read, but I've appreciated the chance to read with fresh eyes, and I'm learning more about amazing writers I haven't yet encountered. The big advantage I have over the undergrads, I'm realizing, is those nine extra years I've had to read and live. I do feel like I have more writers under my belt, and a little more life experience to draw on when thinking about stories or trying to write my own stuff.

Not to say that I'm the hotshot in the class, although a part of me clearly wants to be. I just love that now I have a sheaf of short stories to read during the week, and a creative writing exercise or story to mull over at any given hour, and a paragraph of instructor comments on last week's assignment to ponder and reread to the point of memorization. I feel very thankful to have a space to really think about this kind of thing, and explore why I love it so much and why it is so beautiful and powerful.

Fever state

2011-01-29T13:02:00.000-05:00

This week I've had the flu. On Tuesday night I went down to Philadelphia for a conference, and by Wednesday morning I knew I would be that guy -- the one who coughs, the one who sits on the aisle so he can leave the room easily, the one no one wants to sit directly next to, the one who is obviously ill but in denial about it. So the conference was a roaring success.

Wednesday night, back home, was a disaster. After dinner I coughed so hard that I threw up my meal. Lying in bed I would wake up, shivering violently. Then I would feel incredibly hot, sweat coating my skin. A weird melange of images and thoughts was tormenting me -- snippets of songs I didn't want to hear, visions of a rich a chocolate cake that I worried would make me vomit. It was such a strange loss of control over myself.

The next day I didn't eat anything except a bowl of ramen. Poor L stayed home for the snow day to watch me and LB, who is also sick with a throat infection (not related, thankfully). I tried not to worry about work, and watched as my inbox filled with all sorts of requests, worries, questions. L brought home a Coke for me to drink, and I threw that up too.

On Friday L went to work, and the nanny came over to the apartment to watch Alice. I slept most of the morning away, then spent the afternoon stuck in the bedroom, hiding from the nanny. I didn't need her to see me in my fever state, in the same pajama pants and t-shirt I'd worn the last 72 hours. I felt like the crazy old woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Finally L came home so I could emerge. I actually had the desire, and ability, to eat dinner, and I went to bed later than 8 pm, which was real progress.

Today I'm feeling better but as good as I had hoped. All things considered, this has been a fairly miserable week. I can't remember the last time I had the flu, but right now it seems like some kind of perpetual state of being that will never, ever improve.

The old mattress

2011-01-23T01:10:00.000-05:00

Today the sleek new sofa came. This arrival initiated a cavalcade of change around the apartment. To make room for the new sofa, we are converting the extra bedroom into a sitting room, so we had to move the old sofa -- the ancient sofa, the sixty year-old sofa that my grandparents had originally brought to Charlottesville, that I had brought to Charlottesville fifty years later, that I had brought to New York after that, that my daughter had scratched and tumbled upon -- into the extra bedroom. I spent the morning dismantling the old bed in the extra bedroom, the first bed I had owned as an adult. We put the deconstructed bed frame in the baby's closet but the mattress had to go to the garbage. She was good, but she was old.

Every time I open the door to our elevator I wonder if a wall of water will come tumbling out. This time, as always, no flood emerged. I wheedled the mattress into the elevator and began the journey down to the basement. The mattress was abutted against the wall behind me. I felt a rush of affection and nostalgia. I leaned back into the mattress one last time, thinking of everyone who had slept on it. I prayed the elevator would not stop on its way to my destination so that no one would see me trying to stand and lie down on the vertical mattress. The mattress was firm and familiar against my back. I thanked it.

In the basement I dragged the mattress through the hallway and out into the alley. I knew as soon as I brought the mattress into the cold unfamiliar outdoors that its side would become etched with ice and salt. I shoved the mattress along the cold pavement until it came to rest against the building. Now it was cold and wet and unusable. The old bed was now stacked in the closet. The new sofa was sleek and firm and beautiful. The new sitting room was warm and inviting. There was no space for regret.

There goes my baby

2011-01-17T22:00:00.002-05:00

Child development update!

Pro: Today I feel like she really started grasping the whole "bye bye" thing, opening and closing her fist as we furiously waggle our forearms at her. An awesome achievement. Bye bye! BYE BYE!!!

Con: It was a day of minor head injuries. First there was a loud thump during her morning nap, and when we ran in we found her sitting in the crib, bawling, with the mobile above her completely tangled up and demolished. She had a nice mark on the right side of her forehead, which was later matched by a mark on the left side of her forehead, when she smacked into the tub during her evening bath. Although she now looks like a Klingon, she was still in good spirits and making good eye contact, so everything appears to be fine. It's fun to see her pushing herself and trying to break all the boundaries she encounters, from reaching up to manhandle her mobile to stretching through the bars of her crib to play with the textured surface of the laundry basket. What a wonderland our apartment has become.

Faux Thanksgiving 2010 (A look back)

2011-01-17T21:33:00.000-05:00

I was cleaning out my inbox tonight and found this photo from Faux Thanksgiving 2010 -- our fifth annual celebration. This was all the food we (ok, L) prepared for our feast. This has become one of the happiest nights of the year. The Core comes over -- that is, our four friends who have been the bedrock of our time in New York -- and traditionally we eat like kings and drink and play Taboo. The menu, courtesy of L: baked brie with apples and bread; butternut squash soup; turkey, yams, mashed potatoes, rainbow beets, roasted broccoli, stuffing, baked apples, and salad; and pumpkin pie with cool whip & strawberry-rhubarb pie with ice cream.

This year, for the first time, we had two kids sleeping in the bedrooms while we reveled. Unlike previous years, we conked out around 10 and the evening whimpered to a close shortly thereafter. But it was still epic. I was just proud we had a dining room table this year -- it was the first time we weren't eating with our plates on our knees. Adulthood!

Make it happen

2011-01-10T22:18:00.002-05:00

One of my goals for this year is to try to get a little more serious about writing. In the summer of 2009 I took an online short story writing course, which I loved. Over that period I wrote a story that I liked, and then just let it sit in a drawer for a long time. I recently pulled it out, reread it, and was not horrified. I took this as a good sign. One of my goals for the year is to see this story published, somewhere -- so I've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks revising, rereading, and sending it off to top-notch publications in which it has absolutely no chance of appearing. But hey, it's a place to start! And why the heck not?

I'm reading a biography of Raymond Carver, and reading about how his first wife propped him up and how his work was rejected over and over again. I have no chance of developing as a writer and trying to make something of it if I'm not putting myself out there -- so now I am trying to start.

I'm also trying to take another fiction workshop course through work this semester -- hopefully I can find a seat among all of the undergrads. I will be amused if everyone else is writing about college kids, and my stories are about young married couples with babies, debating the move to the 'burbs.

Anyways -- today was a crap day at work, and there is nothing on TV tonight, so I have been submitting the story to various places while "The Bachelor" yawps on the television. It was not a good day today, and by the end of it I realized all I wanted to do was come home and give my kid a bath. But sure enough, I felt a little better after that.

Hello, 2011

2011-01-01T16:40:00.000-05:00

Looking back on 2010, I keep thinking of that Frank Sinatra song, "It Was A Very Good Year." 2010 was a year of gifts and blessings, beginning with Alice's arrival and continuing through a new job I love and a much happier life overall. L has written about how some years are years of waiting, biding time, while others are years of fruition. Reaping what you have sown, or, more likely, reaping the windfall of blessings you may or may not deserve. Coming off an extremely eventful 2010, I don't know what to expect in 2011. We've talked a little bit about goals for our family, and I have some goals in mind for myself professionally and creatively. But even if 2011 is a year of merely biding our time -- that is, living this wonderful, precarious life of ours, raising our daughter with some degree of purpose, doing our best at meaningful work, trying to be good to our family and friends -- that sounds great to me.

When I was thirty...it was a very good year...

The Top Ten Songs of 2010

2010-12-27T23:54:00.004-05:00

I spend a lot of time thinking about which songs will appear on my end-of-year Top Ten. Starting around November, I start making lists and comparing play totals. I rely on a complex formula of play counts, emotional associations, the representation of different seasons and life experiences, and how sick I am in December of songs that I loved in, say, May. The goal is to make a list I can return to in a couple of years, play the songs, and suddenly remember how all of this has felt. Before we proceed, let me gently remind the reader that this list is objectively correct and not up for debate. Now, on to the music!

10. Alicia Keys, "Unthinkable (I'm Ready)" -- This year I found myself turning to more mid- to slow-tempo music, and this was the first Alicia Keys song in a few years to really grab me. As usual, the lyrics and instrumentation are lush and sophisticated -- the thread of the rhythm guitar, the crescendo of the bridge, the deliberate pauses between chords. I love Drake's subtle background vocals; his interplay with Alicia's main vocals seems gentle and sweet. I've heard the remix where he busts out a full-blown rap, and it's completely unnecessary. One of the admins in my office was singing this song for a solid four months, and I felt a strong affinity with her. This song is fantastic.

9. Shakira feat. Lil Wayne, "Give It Up To Me" -- I've written about this before, but when I found out L was pregnant last summer, I realized I had to do several things by the spring: (1) get a new job; (2) get a new apartment; and (3) have a baby. Miraculously, I was able to accomplish all of these things. To me this song captures both a sense of potential and pride in the achievement: "You can have it all, anything you want you can make it yours, anything you want in the world, anything you want in the world (give it up to me); Nothing too big or small, anything you want you can make it yours, anything you want in the world, anything you want in the world (give it up to me)." On that last phrase of the chorus, Shakira's voice splits in two, and one track rises robotically upward on this fantastic trajectory -- it is beguiling. The track also features a solid opening rap by Lil Wayne, and some excellent production by Timbaland. The last great thing about this song: my hip hop teacher was prominently featured in the music video.

8. Usher feat. Nicki Minaj, "Lil Freak" -- This song is one of the more nakedly misogynistic songs I have ever had the misfortune to love. It's about Usher at the club, soliciting a girl to go find another girl to bring home for a little menage a trois back at the condo. I find this song to be incredibly aggressive -- "if you're coming with me... you go get some girls and bring em to me..." -- and it's a good song to listen to when I'm mad. Comically, or perhaps pathetically, this song is my version of gangsta rap or death metal. The two redeeming features: the twisted Stevie Wonder sample on the chorus, which brings some chaotic, swooping chords on top of the roiling, driving bass line; and Nicki Minaj's rap break, staccato like a machine gun. Sometimes I listen to it just for those 30 seconds -- that and the last instrumental section of the song, where the misogyny takes a back seat so you can just ride the beat for a while.

7. Maxwell, "Love You" -- I got the new Maxwell album a full year behind everybody else. I don't know why I waited; it just happened. This album was a huge part of the mid-tempo soul revival I was talking about above; the classic vibe, clean production, and lack of any autotune or guest rappers was so refreshing and timeless. It was hard to pick just one song, but this one was always my favorite. The beat is driving and exuberant, and the song marches happily forward. "I can be anything you want me to be, I just want to love you." This always made me think of my wife and daughter, not just from the lyrics but from the happy devotion of the singer. The single best line, at 1:06: the gentle falsetto when he sings: "Listen to the way I feel when love can change you, love arranges you." Other highlights from the album: the scorching "Bad Habits," the plaintive "Fistful of Tears," and the insanely beautiful "Playing Possum." That song destroys me.

6. Trey Songz, "Can't Be Friends" -- Trey Songz was my favorite singer this year. He has a great voice with a unique vibrato (occasionally goat-like, I must say) and a solid falsetto range. In the winter he had "Say Aah," and then he had a whole bunch of remixes on other people's songs. My favorites: his fantastic duel with Mariah Carey on "Inseparable," his bout with Usher and Keri Hilson on "I Invented Sex," his redemption of Toni Braxton's "Yesterday." Unlike the rest of his songs, which portray Trey Songz as basically a horny puppy (or a horny baby goat, perhaps), "Can't Be Friends" is a lot more grown. The spare production -- the pulsing strings, a few piano chords -- belie the honesty and vulnerability of the song. "I wish I never fell so deep in love with you and now there ain't no way we can be friends." The best line: his ad lib at 3:06, "I wish we never loved it," as his falsetto bounces all over the scale.

5. Usher feat. will.i.am, "OMG" -- This is the kind of glossy android pop song that pretty much sums up where we are as a culture right now. This song cannibalizes a few oldies, wraps them up in metallic synthesizers, adds a few crowd-pleasing chants and oh's, and then waits for you to devour it. At this late date in the year, I'm pretty sick of this song, but it was a great for running or dancing. We did many a warm-up in hip hop to this. Will.i.am is a solid producer, and he and Usher had a previous collaboration, "What's Your Name," that should have been on one of my previous Top Ten lists (2007? 2008?) but for some reason wasn't.

4. The-Dream feat. T.I., "Make Up Bag" -- Dream came up with his third album in as many years, and he solidified his place as my favorite artist of this era. This song has a mysterious opening, as the bass line, piano notes, and synthesizer chords all intermingle, and then the lyrics turn out to be fantastically cynical about love: the guy is cheating on the girl; the girl catches him; the girl says, "if you don't want to break up, then you know what to do to make up"; to which the guy responds, "If you ever make your girlfriend mad, don't let your good girl go bad, drop five stacks on the make up bag, drop drop five stacks on the make up bag." The key there -- that "drop drop" repeat. The song rolls forward and grows, broadening out as you wait for that chorus to kick in again. T.I.'s rap is quick, honey-coated, and irresistible. This is one of Dream's richer and more mysterious songs.

3. Toni Braxton, "Make My Heart" -- Toni came out with a new album this year, and let me tell you, it was not that great. I still think she has the best voice in female R&B, but she has moved away from the dark, sophisticated songs that really grabbed me. Her album had a couple of stand-outs, namely "Caught," which was as good as smooth, slow-burning Toni gets. This song, "Make My Heart," was an awesome club track: call-and-response horns, urgent beats, great bass lines, and a catchy chorus complete with "da da dum dum dum, da da dum dum dum." I could not get enough of this song over the summer: running along the Hudson, jamming in the apartment. There are some awesome remixes out there too.

2. Drake, "Find Your Love" -- I heard this song in hip hop, and then I heard it ratified on the streets, jamming out of car windows all summer. "I better find your lovin, I better find your heart, I bet if I give all my love then nothin's gonna tear us apart." The strong beat kicking off the track and leading to the first verse, the way the song opens up on the chorus, like flowers growing towards the sun. Drake's straightforward singing, the "hey hey heys" punctuating the verses. The beat kicking in on the second verse. Dang, just hearing it now makes me think of July. I love the slow groove here, the lazy echo of Drake's vocal track, the piano chords grounding the song. I just want to dance all cool with this one. (And of course, I remixed the song for Alice as I tried to put her arms through her jacket sleeves -- "I better find your fingers, I better find your hand...") Over the summer I was sure this would be my number one song of the year. Until...

1. The-Dream, "Turnt Out" -- The first time I heard this song I was writing at the computer, late at night, and I had to listen to this song six times on repeat. It's your basic "let's have sex right now" kind of song, but it stood out based on the beguiling introduction to the song, the guitar lick on the chorus, and Dream's clever use of falsetto. The bridge of the song really sealed the deal for me -- he's been singing in falsetto this whole time, chorusing "I'ma do ya til you (oh oh oh) turnt out," but the bridge is in his normal range, adding a new heft and urgency and playfulness as he jumps from his lower range to his falsetto. After the bridge the chorus kicks up the intensity, with the synth responding to the lines of the chorus with different rhythms, with Dream doing some impressive vocal runs, with the instrumentation melting together, turning out. This is one of those slow songs you want to dance to; the relaxed beat and pace create plenty of time and space for movement, for expression. This song is confident and hot and solid, and I still can't get enough of it.

So that's the ten. Thank you for reading all of this, if you slogged all the way through. I always feel that I lack the words to describe what the music does and how it moves me. This year I didn't feel like I listened to as much stuff as usual, but the compulsion and connection were still there. I don't get dance hour as often as I used to -- now it's more internal, thinking how I would move, thinking how I wish I could sing -- but dang if I don't still want it. But like they say: Too much is never enough.

Music makes me so damn happy.

Blizzard/Christmas

2010-12-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

It's a blizzard night in New York as I write this. The streets are quiet, muffled by snow and not yet lined with the tracks of cabs and plows. Street signs blink their litanies to empty sidewalks. From here, snowflakes are swirling and diving in all directions above the ground. Our windows are speckled with snow and ice but the pink sky looms beyond, a haze of snowy light lacquered onto the darkness. The snow dampens everything.

We had a very nice Christmas this year, the three of us. On Christmas Eve L made a beef brisket, beets, roasted potatoes, green and yellow beans, and salad. Our appetizer was parsnip and leek soup. Dessert was double chocolate-chip muffins, with some vanilla ice cream. Our friends came over, along with their daughter and one set of their parents. We had a great meal, a long, warm night, listening to the same set of Christmas carols several times over. And the most exciting element of Christmas Eve -- Alice started crawling! Finally the pieces clinked in her head -- she could move from lying down to sitting to scooching to pulling herself up to crawling, like an extremely methodical elementary-level break dancer. She started trundling all over the place, from the family room to the kitchen, pausing to slap on boxes or pull down Christmas gifts or check out the wheels of the stroller.

On Christmas day Alice wasn't that into the presents, although she enjoyed tearing apart tissue paper. We went to church, where of course they asked us to bring up the gifts to the altar, which gave me something to worry about for the first 2/3rds of the mass. But it was wonderful, with an amazing choir that really knocked the carols out of the park. This Christmas I thought a lot about the Christmas story as the story of a child's birth and as an experience of new parenthood, which tapped into some deep and visceral emotions at unexpected times. I suppose every parent thinks their child's birth is worthy of the choirs of angels and the shepherds and the magi. Or at least a room at the inn; how could a parent abide with the indignity of their infant among the livestock and the hay? Somehow it was all enough to get me choked up a little during "Silent Night," which had never happened before.

After church we went to a delicious brunch at our friends' -- amazing quiche, french toast bread pudding. Our friends got us amazing gifts. Because my friend John always has these amazingly cool sneakers that I never have the guts or panache to purchase myself, he bought me a pair -- I was overwhelmed. It was the perfect gift, since I would never dare to buy them, but would always covet them and rue my own shoe conservatism. (I am not a good gift-giver; I'm not good at projecting what others would want. I'm too much a creature of habit to make that imaginative leap. This is a handicap I try to overcome every year.)

The rest of Christmas day was quiet and relaxing at home. We were all very exhausted. Our exhaustion rolled pleasantly into today, and we were happy to bundle up at home amid the Christmas lights and the pleasantly churning snowstorm outside. We ventured out late in the day, packing up Alice in her new snowsuit from Great Grammy and Great Grampy, and went up Claremont to 116th, then through the bright lights at Columbia, then down to the subway at 110th. We passed several restaurants that looked warm and inviting, a perfect place for a drink. But this is not the kind of winter; maybe if the baby wasn't an issue, or if money wasn't an issue -- but two strikes was enough today. A year ago we could have gone in for a nice beer or a warm drink and an appetizer -- would have sat in the warmth and let our noses run as we took a moment to watch the snow fall on Broadway, resting and enjoying a few moments of conviviality before venturing back into the predictable discomfort of a storm. But this is a different kind of winter.

I am excited to see the city that will greet us in the morning! What a blessing to have our family tucked in at home as the snow globe whirls on around us.

Awkward

2010-12-20T23:04:00.000-05:00

Normally I am a cool and suave dude, but not today. I should have known today would be weird when I found myself this morning scraping the bottom of the business-casual barrel. No good shirts left. No reasonable pants. So instead I was rocking a pair of cords and one of those flowy, non-fitted dress shirts with several yards of extraneous fabric billowing gloriously around one's midsection. Wisely, I stuffed this fabric under a sweater, which made me look like I was smuggling a wedding cake. This is how I chose to approach the world. Consequently, several unfortunate things happened:

First, as I was leaving the men's room at work this morning, I walked directly into another colleague who was on his way in. This was fantastically awkward. There was torso-to-torso contact. Why did I not see him? Later in the day I considered apologizing, but I thought this might actually make it worse.

Second, later on I was speaking to a colleague of the female persuasion, and I somehow mentioned that I had game, and she then said, "you have a wife and a baby daughter, you don't have game." Trying to salvage the conversation without seeming unduly lecherous, I cried out, "But I used to!", which made me feel like no less of a creep.

Third, in the afternoon I was eating a brownie as part of the office's Holiday Cookie Exchange (somehow we never had one at the law firm, perhaps because the lawyers were too busy at night resenting their loved ones to bake) when a colleague came up and poked me in the stomach, Pillsbury-dough-boy style. And of course he got me right at the point in my midsection where my sweater masked about eight layers of billowy dress shirt fabric, and his finger just sort of continued on, unimpeded. It reminded me of the burrito I ate yesterday, which had guacamole in it, and when I bit into the burrito in the guacamole part the whole thing just collapsed because there was nothing solid there. That was kind of like my midsection today.

In an effort to redeem the day, the brownie, and my dough-boy-esque physique, I went to the gym tonight for a little lifting and a good spin class. I was wearing a shirt with no sleeves, but thankfully no one made fun of me. The class was great and it was a good workout. And best of all, when I came home I saw that L had picked up the drycleaning, which means that tomorrow I will be much better-equipped for the day that is to come.

Best books of 2010

2010-12-20T13:20:00.002-05:00

In chronological order, here are the books I loved most in 2010:

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

This list does not seem very long, for an entire year's worth of reading. I read a lot of books that weren't that great this year (here's looking at you, Wolf Hall and Freedom (see more thoughts on the latter book here)). I switched from buying books to going to the library. I read some more short stories (including Mavis Gallant, Deborah Eisenberg, Lorrie Moore and others) but Wells Tower was the only one I loved. Game Change was practically perfect, in its gossipy political way, but I didn't read as much history as usual.

Fiction-wise, Moby-Dick frustrated me as I read it but left me reeling (more thoughts here). The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a book that captivated me since I was a little kid, turned out to be almost prophetic (more thoughts here), and bookended nicely by The Privileges. But my favorite novel of the year would have to be Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Although the plot of this slender book is modest and direct, I thought she wrote very ambitiously about the post-9/11 era through the lens of a small cast of characters. I actually think she accomplished what Jonathan Franzen tried to do in a much more bloated way. Moore's writing was impeccable, and besides from one far-fetched episode with the protagonist's mysterious boyfriend, I thought this book was flawless.

(While on the subject of Lorrie Moore, let me note that she wrote the most fantastic simile I've read in a long time, from her story "Charades" in Birds of America: "She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor's office, but it is a limited thing--like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands, and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable.")

The best non-fiction I read -- just beating out the salacious popcorn of Game Change and the ongoing train of biographical perfection that is The Years of Lyndon Johnson -- was Cheever: A Life. After discovering Cheever's fiction a couple years back, I was very interested to read about his sad and troubled life. I had a lot of sympathy for him, for his demons, for the suffering he inflicted on himself and on others. His was a fascinating life, and Blake Bailey created an exemplary biography, as well as a great literary study of Cheever's works.

Right now I'm read Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead, a great book for these dark winter days. Coming up in the queue: a new biography of Raymond Carver and -- finally -- with baited breath -- Master of the Senate. I'm hoping those will get me through the winter, and then who knows what's next. I'd like to read some older, more classic short stories (maybe Chekhov or something) and am thinking possibly about Anthony Trollope. And hey, there's always Decision Points.

Christmas tree

2010-12-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

Last night I went out and bought a Christmas tree from one of the street-side vendors. This is one of those New York Christmas traditions that redeems an otherwise cruel and unforgiving place. Transforming small patches of sidewalk into a temporary pine forest; the strapping, friendly, Portland-esque people who staff these stands at all hours of the day and night; the merrily pathetic Charlie Brown trees and the flimsy plastic shelters the Portlanders stay in to stay warm -- all of it creates a very plausible, useful, and reasonable amount of genuine holiday cheer. Just this morning on my way to work I inadvertently got caught walking between a father and his kids and their local Christmas tree saleswoman, who the kids had clearly met before. "Wave hi to Molly!" the father called out. "Hi, Molly! Have a good day!" Although I felt like a tool for blocking the wee moppets' view of Molly, this encounter made me happy.

Although I was pleased with our tree, I immediately had concerns that it was a little on the shrimpy side. Yes, it's kind of narrow, but the price was right, and we're not exactly living in Versailles anyway. You always find the tree to match your season, and I think we found the right one.

L and I decorated tonight accompanied by Toni Braxton's Christmas CD, "Snowflakes," which was released in 2001 and has become a holiday classic (the same way the N'Sync holiday CD is a classic for my parents, my sister, and me). There's one song on the Toni album, "Snowflakes of Love," that always struck me as treacly and overly sentimental. "On this day, snowy day/Let me thank you for the joy you're giving me/I'm so happy/I have snowflakes of love smiling down on me." Who could actually feel that way? No one feels that way.

And yet, last night I was listening to the song, sharing a quiet moment with Alice as we danced slowly and contemplated the tree. "Reminiscing, I get so happy/I just break down and cry." No tears were shed, but at last I could understand that the song had been waiting for me for nine long years.

PTSD

2010-12-03T16:48:00.000-05:00

The other night I had a dream that I was working again at my old law firm on some kind of special project. They had call me in because they needed my expertise (as profound as it is) and familiarity with the firm. Even in my dream state I was doubting why I had accepted this job. "I need the money, but not this badly." At the firm, I saw all of the old people, as well as a few strangers who had joined the firm since my departure. I was dressed casually and felt uncomfortable, yet I was sitting around a big conference table getting ready to dive back into a particular kind of work and working environment.

When I woke up I thanked my lucky stars once again for my change in circumstance. I think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about that place -- mentally mapping the hallways, checking out the current roster of attorneys on the website, skimming through Google News. As time has passed my impressions of that place, and my role there, have changed. In some ways I invested too much there; I put too much value on others' opinions and gave them the same tools they later used to cut me. But who could have foreseen that.

Of course, the enduring legacy of that experience has been a lasting doubt in my own professional ability, the deflation of my self-confidence. On some days I'm angry about that. But all of that is over now, and only in my dreams would I ever cross that threshold again.

Single father

2010-12-02T10:31:00.000-05:00

For the last several days I have been playing the role of single father while L attends a conference. I have thought of her often, usually missing her civilizing touch and tender loving care, but I also thought of her as I watched two episodes of "The Walking Dead," the grisly yet compelling new show about zombies overrunning Atlanta, which happens to be the city where L's conference is taking place.

On a brighter note, I have enjoyed my time as a single dad. It's fairly easy. In order to ensure a happy, tranquil baby, I recommend stuffing her to the gills with food. At night before bed she enjoys a nice hearty meal of formula plus some pureed vegetables, then she goes down very easily. On the first night she woke up around midnight for another snack. Then she woke up at 4 am for reasons that were unclear to me. She didn't want to eat, or have her diaper changed, or be in her crib. So I gave her a few sips of water and just put her in bed with me, arranging a pillow fort so she wouldn't roll out. And then she seemed calm and willing to sleep, as long as she had a hand or foot pressed into my neck. But that's a small price to pay.

Last night, she gorged on formula and pureed bell peppers. While she had the bottle she would dramatically drape an arm on top of it, obscuring her face except for her big eyes staring at me, or she would reach up a hand to gingerly and carefully try to pick my nose. Afterwards the girl was knocked out for a solid twelve hours. I actually woke up in a panic around 5:30 because I hadn't heard from her in so long. But she was fine, and was up and babbling when I got out of the shower.

I must admit, the mornings have been more challenging. How is anyone expected to bathe, clothe, feed and change (as needed) two people? I haven't managed to eat breakfast at home any day this week, and Alice has not technically had a bath in a while, and the house is kind of a mess, and I am living off the largesse L left behind for us, and most of my meals have been pizza- or burrito-based, and the laundry is overflowing, and I don't think I boiled the plastic nipples of the bottle long enough before I used them for the first time.

Going into this week I had been afraid of perpetual screaming, sleepless nights, and an inconsolable child. The fact that none of that has really happened, and that we are all doing generally okay, has been immensely rewarding.

Night run

2010-11-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

Tonight I went on a run for the first time in a while. By the time I got outside after work it was already pitch dark, but not too cool. I ran across 114th to Riverside Park and ran up and down Riverside Drive, between 79th and 120th. It was one of those nights when I felt propelled; when I was constantly trying to run faster and faster. Lately it seems like I have these moments when I'm walking calmly down the street but I suddenly have the urge to run, to release some energy through my legs and into the receptive asphalt below. To remind myself that I live and am a force.

I had never run at night before in this neighborhood, and I had to keep a close eye on the rolling paving stones under my feet to make sure I didn't trip. The street lights offered bright, filmy circles to guide my way, narrowing the park to this single artery. I listened to a new playlist of my 20 favorite songs of the year, and I kept an eye on my shadows around me, quick, consistent, faster than I thought I was.

When I finished my legs were aching pleasantly and my throat was cold from the night air. I felt so good. The last great run I had was during our weekend upstate in Patterson, running along winding mountain roads, past old farmhouses and barns, beneath a storm of bright fall color. Tonight was different, simpler, more elemental: feet pounding the road, lungs pumping air, breath and heartbeat and sweat. A reminder that I can create force.

Of course, somehow on the walk home I appear to have lost my work ID. A fun new project for the morning. Two steps forward, always one back.

Cry of the velociraptor, cont'd

2010-11-17T18:03:00.001-05:00

Further entries to the index of sounds that A makes:

1. The Rebel Yell -- Oftentimes, instead of crying, Alice will opt to yell. It sounds like this: "AAAAAAAAAH!" There is remarkably little variation in tone. She yells with a cartoonish consistency, an admirable lack of hesitation or vibrato. When she yells like this her anger and petulance are cute in their intensity. "Pay attention to me!" "I don't like this!" "Let me put the remote control in my mouth!" These are just a few of the messages she conveys.

2. The Gaga Ooh La La -- Alice seems to have adopted the lyrical genius found in Lady Gaga's song "Bad Romance," the part of the chorus that goes: Rah rah ah ah ah, Roma roma ma, Ga ga ooh la la, Want your bad romance. (As an aside, note that until just now I thought that the last lyric was "watch out for romance," which to me is more interesting, but the internet has informed me that I'm wrong.) Not unlike Lady Gaga, Alice enjoys consonants and vowels. We often hear her little murmurings of ba, ga, ma, da, ra, etc. These are most likely to emerge when she is quiet or happy, sing-songing her little words to go along with the blather of the adults in the room. This appears to be the extent of Lady Gaga's influence on our child, at least for the time being.

3. The Constant Vigilance -- This is not a sound per se, but I find it amusing. When you hold her against you she will crane her neck to check out what's to the side of you. You will turn to that side, thinking you are doing her a favor, when she will lean back and swivel her head to check out the other side. "What's happening over here? Now what's happening over there? Did something happen over here?" It's kind of weird. It seems like something a fairly stupid but lovable dog would do. A dog...and our baby.

4. The Rappeller -- This is another behavior, rather than a sound. Thanks to her ever-more muscular physique, sometimes when you hold her to your chest she wants nothing to do with you, so she will dig a foot into your hip or belt and push herself away from you, holding much of her weight with her locked legs and bracing herself against your chest with an outstretched arm as you keep her balanced with a hand on her back. It's very amusing to see her hanging out there, head cocked to the side as she casually leans back into the empty space in front of you. Can you imagine her on a little rock face hoisted up with some ropes, with her fat little baby hands covered in chalk? Can you even fathom how cute a little baby caribiner would be? I can't.

Truth in advertising

2010-11-08T22:01:00.000-05:00

We're watching Matt Lauer's interview with errant schoolboy/former president George W. Bush, where W. is hawking his new book, "Decision Points." The hilarious part, aside from the inappropriate laughter, awkward smiles, and frowny faces, is that most of these decision points turned out to be...not so great: Invading Iraq under false pretenses! A ten-year war in Afghanistan! No Osama! "Mission Accomplished"! Katrina! The great recession! Those decisions all worked out great, huh?

You know what would have been a better name for W.'s book than "Decision Points"? "Fuck Ups."

Maybe for the paperback edition.

NYC marathon 2010

2010-11-07T20:21:00.000-05:00

Today L and I trekked over to 125th & 5th to cheer on one of her friends who was running the New York City Marathon. It was a beautiful day for it -- open blue skies, a biting chill in the air tempered by a strong sun. As we approached 5th Avenue we could see the constant stream of runners moving through. The nice thing about the uptown phase of the marathon is that it's fairly empty; we could easily take our place on the sidelines -- or more accurately, in the street, somewhat crowding the runners as they proceeded -- to cheer and clap and yell their names. The crowd was thin but exuberant; everyone yelling out the names of people who had identified themselves, or their country, or their cause on their shirts. "Go Amy! Viva Mexico! NYPD! Go barefoot guy! Go France! Go Barthelona! Go juggler!"

People would respond with a thumbs up, or a wave, or a smile. At the time we were cheering, a lot of people were looking pretty rough. We were near mile 21 or 22, a real low point in the marathon experience. You're running farther than you ever have before, and you're back in Manhattan, but you're far from Central Park and the euphoria of those last turns in the road. We saw a lot of grimaces, people limping. When L's friend came around, she looked great -- strong and steady. She received her hugs and kept on moving with a big grin on her face. When I ran it, those brief encounters with loved ones gave me such fuel; I would anticipate them and then, afterwards, replay them, waiting for the next rendezvous, the next moment of sustenance. Today one lady on the sidelines saw her friend running up, shrieked, gave her a wild hug, then started running alongside her, in leather boots.

We saw old people, young people, blind people, people with walkers, foreign people, fit people, sexy people, chunky people, people running, walking, limping. I felt really excited for them and really proud. This afternoon before we left I spent a few scrambled minutes trying to find my old marathon stuff, maybe wear my medal out of solidarity. I couldn't find it of course, so instead I just stood on the sidelines with Alice on my chest, clapping and yelling the name of every person I could identify. It made me miss it, and think about possibilities for next year. I had never been a marathon spectator before, and it was more enjoyable than I expected.

It was three years ago that I ran it. Not too long ago, but not yesterday, either. Feeling those old rumblings rising up again...

Sweet sorrow

2010-11-05T18:13:00.001-04:00

On Monday, Alice was the id of our family. We were in McLean, at my parents' house with my folks, grandparents, and L's mom. We were heading to the train station to return to New York, but L's mom had come by to say goodbye -- she was leaving that day for an exciting year-long opportunity in Afghanistan. It might be six months until we are able to see her again.

The house was simmering with the usual pre-departure anxiety, exacerbated by the presence of an unhappy, unsettled baby. Alice hadn't slept well all weekend, and this morning she was crying and jabbering, arching her back against anyone who would hold her. Her forlorn cries were the background as we bustled around with bags and last-minute details.

The goodbyes started as we made our way to the door with all of our things. In the foyer L and her mom were hugging tearfully. L's mom embraced me and said she loved me, and I said the same with a huge lump in my throat. I said, "it will be good, it will be good." In the driveway L and her mom hugged again with Alice strapped to her mama's chest. How I wished she could remember this. As L's mom got in her car I had my arm around my wife, who was leaning into me as our daughter craned her neck around to peer at her mama.

Soon enough we were on our way to Union Station with the realization that the goodbyes were behind us. My grandma had said to me, "take care of your little family," and for a brief moment it felt like a daunting responsibility. But now we are home, easing back into normal life. Finding a way to live as our love and prayers fly through the night from our home to Afghanistan.

Book review: "Freedom"

2010-10-23T08:10:00.002-04:00

I was rabidly excited to read Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom." I loved his previous novel, "The Corrections," and am a long-time fan of his non-fiction pieces in the New Yorker. He writes with a strain of effete east coast snobbery that I sadly recognize in myself, but he doesn't seem too burned up about it. As if his past work wasn't enough, Franzen was being proclaimed The Great American Novelist on the cover of Time, Oprah picked his book for her club, and he was the subject of many long, fawning reviews that I wallowed in reading, sometimes twice.

Of course, I should have been warned when those same reviews contained sentences like this: "Franzen cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism." My thought was: Wait a second, did he write a book or build a robot? I was also irritated by the use of the verb "tweeze."

Despite this, I forged ahead. To read this book I broke my own personal rules about waiting until the paperback edition, and about not spending unnecessary amounts of money during this age of austerity. I even returned the first copy of the book that I purchased because I realized that I could save $2 if I ordered it online. And so, late last night, after purchasing in total two copies of this book, I finished the damn thing.

How do you describe the sound of the air leaking out of a balloon? I kept waiting for the brilliance, the cohesion. Franzen is an undeniably compelling writer, and I devoured this book -- but I never saw it as a masterpiece. The main characters and plots were described opaquely, elliptically -- through the perceptions of the neighbors, through an interminable autobiography of 200+ pages. I kept waiting for a strong narrative voice to come in and unify the characters, the ideas. Instead it felt like a negative portrait of the characters -- Franzen stuffed the margins with contemporary ideas and name-droppings, filling in the excess with riffs on war profiteering or mountain-top removal mining, and what remained, silhouetted in the middle, were the main characters. (Perhaps the previous sentence is as bad as the one cited above, but then again, this is not the NYT Book Review.)

I appreciate a writer with ambition, and Franzen plotted the hell out of this -- intricate, complicated, with dynamics that emerge once and resurface again later -- but the structure and episodic nature of the book made it difficult to embrace as a unifying work. The characters seemed flat, caricatures of actual humans: the aging rocker; the desperate former athlete/housewife, the "Republican" son, who never did anything remotely Republican; etc.

Although Franzen nodded to contemporary events and motifs, he seemed to just throw them all against the wall in the hopes that the mere mention of Sarah Silverman or YouTube would somehow transform the book into an engrossing portrait of the era. As if mere reflection and recitation were enough, instead of the deep digging I was hoping for. The characters were ciphers, vessels to carry these labels, yet they never engaged with them.

Personally, it was interesting to read about Franzen's idea of UVA during 9/11, which I was present for, or of McLean, Virginia, which is my hometown. He was sort of right and sort of wrong about both. His writing often fell flat for me -- none of the casual poetry of Ian McEwan or Lorrie Moore -- and there were some sentences that seemed as if they had been dashed off in an email, rather than as part of this year's Great American. Too much dialogue in ALL CAPS.

But did I enjoy reading the book? Yes, I did. I couldn't put it down. There were a few emotionally resonant scenes, and I enjoyed how he toyed with the idea of freedom -- its blessing and its potential danger in our modern society. The opening and closing sections were strong, steered by an omniscient narrator who could survey a broad community of characters and ideas, who could describe the sunset falling over a lakeside community, who could write with biting wit. If only Franzen had not ceded the book to so many other, lesser voices.

As far as the chorus of ecstatic reviews go, I think I have been burned by the literary hype machine. Once again I asked L if perhaps I'm just a lazy or shallow reader, but I don't think so (I've got David Brooks and B.R. Myers in my corner). Perhaps the overwhelming praise is for Franzen's ambition, if not his execution; perhaps it's for our own self-indulgence as we read a novel about liberals with irony and Twitter streams; or perhaps this is a round of literary self-congratulation to which outsiders are not invited. The final disappointment came when I realized that the people to whom the book was dedicated were Franzen's agent and publisher.

Mel's Burger Bar: Never again

2010-10-17T20:09:00.000-04:00

We just came home from a singularly shitty meal at Mel's Burger Bar, at 111th Street and Broadway. We had made plans to eat there with John and Anna and Naomi early, at 5:30, so that we could return home in time to put the children to bed without any major meltdowns. This is smart, right? This was good thinking.

The first sign of trouble came when we asked the waiter to give us a minute to look at the menu, and he disappeared for 15. When we finally placed our orders, the food took almost an hour to arrive. In the meantime the babies were fussing and various adults in our party were taking turns jostling the kids, walking them around, or trying to distract them with napkins and the smacking-the-table game. When our food did eventually arrive -- after several conversations with the waiter in which he invariably assured us that it would be out in a few minutes -- my entire order was missing. Once my hamburger arrived, I had to ask yet again for my fries. They also messed up John's order too. I finally asked to speak to the manager, and the young man who I took for a busboy turned out to be it. He explained that the kitchen was slow and that the restaurant had gotten slammed. He was not very apologetic, and did not seem to care, although he did offer to pay for our drinks. When the food finally arrived we devoured our meals in about ten minutes; we had to go home to put the children to bed. Our waiter came back eventually and asked if we wanted a refill or anything, but I was too pissed to look at him and declined, even though I was dying for another Coke. I had a point to make, and opted to stew in my own martyrdom. When the check came, we decided, after much deliberation, not to leave a tip. And I think that was the right thing to do, under the circumstances.

What kills me about a blown meal -- whether due to restaurant staff incompetence, failure of a delivery to arrive, or the classic table-side interpersonal argument -- is that you have no way of recovering the time and the experience: that was your dinner, as shitty as it may have been, and that's that. You'll just have to wait for the next meal to try to have a nice time. At one point tonight John remarked that the evening was just totally gone for me, with no chance of redemption, and unfortunately he was right. Maybe I'm being a jerk by wallowing in my own frustration, but I still have to ask: why do I, as the diner, have the burden of addressing the shitty service that the restaurant is providing? I don't want to be confrontational. Why doesn't the restaurant realize that the best way to build loyalty among customers is to proactively respond to a bad experience? Had the manager acknowledged how badly the dinner had gone -- had he bought us dessert or comped the meal, or even just genuinely apologized -- we would have had a great time and would have had a positive experience at Mel's Burger Bar. Instead here I am writing about this, trying to repeat the name of the restaurant (Mel's Burger Bar) to improve its Google hits and noting that other diners across the internet have also experienced similarly bad service at this place, which is called Mel's Burger Bar.

I think I was a little riled up based on hearing about John and Anna's encounter with a surly, unprofessional security guard at the Natural History Museum, and my own interaction yesterday with an obnoxious line-cutting woman at Absolute Bagels. (She cut in line ahead of me to join her friend, and when I started trying to place my order, she tried to cut me off, at which point I said, "Sorry, I didn't see you standing here this whole time," and then she gave me a dirty look, although I feel I won the karmic battle when her order got messed up and I completed my transaction and left the place ahead of her.) It's incredibly frustrating when people treat you thoughtlessly, or contemptibly, and you feel you have no recourse but to sit there and take their shit. I don't know if it is a new confidence, or a new pettiness, or a new crankiness, but there are some times when I find myself uttering a snotty remark, or leaving a tip of exactly $0.00, because it's the most appropriate way I can think of to politely suggest that somebody can go fuck themselves.

And that's the end of my rant. I feel angrier than your average Tea Party participant right about now.

Into the (pregnancy) archives

2010-10-08T23:57:00.000-04:00

One housekeeping note:

Back when we found out about the baby, I started a private blog to write about some early pregnancy stuff. In the interest of efficiency, and to assist my future biographers, I imported those posts into ol' Clarity. So if you're interested in reading about the heady days of July and August 2009, here are the links to those stories:

Day one/Dandelion -- July 22, 2009

Collect $200 -- August 6, 2009

Telling my parents -- August 6, 2009

Zzzzzzzz

2010-10-08T23:10:00.000-04:00

I am finding myself a little bored these days. When the evening rolls around, we know we have to be home around 6:30 for LB to go to bed. And, unfortunately, when the baby falls asleep, you still can't leave the house and go out for the evening -- that's frowned upon by most childcare experts. Consequently we're left with this cavernous four-to-five-hour block of time to fill before we officially go to bed.

And do you know how we usually fill this time? By watching television! Depending on the night, we will watch several episodes of a completely disposable, completely interchangeable lineup of shitty reality shows! Here is how every single show goes: in the first ten minutes the challenge is announced. Then we see the contestants work on it. Then we see the judges criticize their work and the contestants receive their comeuppance. Then someone wins. Then there is a small degree of inconsequential suspense. Then someone is eliminated. Then that person talks about how they're doing much better now. And then we start a new show!

Tonight we were both home at 5:30. The baby was fussy yet still somewhat patient so we decided, in the a burst of wild-hearted spontaneity, to go to a restaurant for an early dinner. Alice started fussing but she was content to lie down on the banquette while we quickly ate. Then we came home and put Alice to bed. L fell asleep on the couch at 6:30. I watched "Top Chef Just Desserts," 20 minutes of an Oprah Winfrey show about 30 year-old virgins, and "The Apprentice." L woke up near the end of that last show. Then she went into the bed to sleep for real, and I continued watching a random episode of "Big Love." Scripted television is a rare treat in our house.

So, in sum, I am a little bored. I feel guilty going to the gym in the evening because I'm away from my family and leaving L with all the childcare duties. But damn if it isn't kind of boring to be home all night, every night. Too tired to read or write, too awake to sleep. Television is easy, but it's so insipid.

Baptism

2010-10-05T00:11:00.004-04:00

On Saturday we celebrated Alice's baptism. It was a far lovelier thing than I had ever thought it would be.

Her christening gown has been hanging in our closet for several months. We kept it wrapped in its plastic hanger and carried it downtown to the church for the actual event. L and I changed her from her chic Baby Gap dress into her stately gown in a bathroom tucked away in some far-flung corner of the church, standing Alice up on the changing table to put on her slip and then button her into her dress. It took me a few minutes to work out all the pins holding the various pieces of the garment together. We added a bangle that LeeLee had given her, and tied her into some clean white booties, and the final touch was to add the little hat that draped over her head like a wimple. She looked like a cute little Hester Prynne of a girl. The shocking thing, though -- the thing that I genuinely did not expect -- was that she looked beautiful. Somehow the exorbitant dress and the funny bunched-up sleeve and her World-War-I-era-nurse hat all made sense. She looked beautiful and pure; it seemed like the foreshadowing of a wedding day, almost, and it reminded me of how the Church is supposed to be revered as the bride of Christ. I did not expect any of this.

She was remarkably calm through the whole ceremony. She played with the long cords dangling from the sides of the hat, wrapping them around her fingers and trying to eat them. When it came time for me to lower her over the baptismal font so that the priest could pour water on her forehead, she kept her eyes locked on him, calmly watching the entire thing. My grandfather said he never saw a better-behaved baby at a christening. The priest was friendly and kind, calling her "sweet Alice" and making sure the holy water was the right temperature before the sacrament began.

I was struck by the beauty of the language of the baptismal rite. Here are some parts that I found particularly lovely as the priest recited the words:

My dear brothers and sisters, God uses the sacrament of water to give his divine life to those who believe in him. Let us turn to him, and ask him to pour his gift of life from this font on this child he has chosen.

Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament.

At the very dawn of creation your Spirit breathed on the waters, making them the wellspring of all holiness. Your Son willed that water and blood should flow from his side as he hung upon the cross. And after his resurrection Christ told his disciples: "Go out and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

Father, look now with love upon your Church, and unseal for them the fountain of baptism. By the power of the Spirit give to the water of this font the grace of your Son. You created us in your own likeness: cleanse us from sin in a new birth to innocence by water and the Spirit.

I was very happy the we decided to baptize our girl. I'm happy that she is a member of a faith community, even though I have many issues with the doctrine and with the way the current leadership has decided to engage the world. I'm glad we can tell her some day that it was important to us to welcome her into a formal relationship with God and community. I think sacraments are important things -- a way to measure life -- and I'm really happy we could give Alice her first one; that we could add her name to the rolls of a church, that we could hear a priest bless her as a member of this flawed yet hopeful flock, that we as an extended family could share a small moment of religious faith.

I'm also glad we will be able to show her the outpouring of love our little family received on the occasion. It meant a lot to us to see our parents, grandparents, siblings and friends gathered in that church on that beautiful Saturday.

Cry of the velociraptor

2010-09-27T00:05:00.001-04:00

Here is a partial index of the noises A makes:

1. The Ur-giggle -- My kid doesn't quite yet understand the tenets of comedy (irony, slapstick, wordplay, hypocrisy, despair, and existential angst), but she can sort of see them on the horizon. Certain stimuli will elicit some kind of proto-laughter from her, a very special staccato grunt that you earn if you smooch on her arms from her wrists up to her shoulders, or if you pretend to chomp at her hands. The Ur-giggle lacks all of the pitch and melodics of genuine laughter, but it has the rhythm about right. It's like a happier version of an asthma attack, or the wheezing of a jolly long-term smoker.

2. The Velociraptor Cry -- This is a stranger one. When you keep your face a few inches from hers, eventually her hands, in their semi-random flailing, will smack onto your skin, and find a grip in your cheeks or nose or eyelids. This becomes a genuinely riotous occurrence, and she will express some mysterious emotion or thought (amusement? conquest? resentment?) with a single extended, shrill, piercing note. Many times I am sitting there, letting her mangle my face, as she literally screams inches away from me. I am so close to her that all I can see if her mouth and the little gems of saliva gathering at the corners of her lips during her high, strangely monotonous shriek. If this was a horror movie, her skin would peel back and she would become a demon and eat my face off. But so far she just expresses herself with the velociraptor cry.

3. The Wail of the Dispossessed -- At least once a night, after she has been put to bed, A will cry because she has rolled over onto her stomach and now finds herself at a complete loss as to how she got there, and how she could possibly flip herself back over. This is a comically pathetic noise. She is crying, but her heart's not in it. Then we just sneak back into her room, try to gently flip her over without either fully waking her up or breaking her arm, and then hightail it out of there. Sadly, her learning curve on this particular issue has been a little disappointing. Here's a hint! Roll over again!

4. The Woo -- We are reaching the really exciting phase of parenthood where it's okay to throw your child around. We can toss her upwards and actually give her a fraction of a second to fly and fall in the air. She just loves it, too. She always seems to look at some nearby point, perhaps to ground her perception, but she just clasps her hands and offers a big wide smile. She may grunt or chuckle but she will more likely just squeal happily, long ropes of saliva falling through the air like the massive payloads of fire retardant that airplanes drop to fight forest fires. She is up in the air, weightless for a second at our outstretched fingertips, smiling at us as we brave the intermittent showers of spittle to laugh at her glee and to woo along with her, watching her fly above us from our place on the distant ground.

44th floor

2010-09-24T23:25:00.001-04:00

The other night I attended a law firm cocktail party with some former colleagues of mine. I made sure to bring a tie to work to put on for the occasion. So around 5:30, instead of leaving the office and walking a few blocks north back home, I descended with the hordes into the subway and barreled into midtown. At Times Square I was walking against the mob to get to the shuttle to Grand Central; the throngs of people were jostling around me and literally twisting my bag around my body with their constant, thoughtless motion.

On Park Avenue, on the way to the right office building, I passed a few open-air bars where men in business casual attire stood holding their beers and looking boorish. When I found the right lobby I made my way through security and entered the high-speed elevator to zip upward 44 floors. The offices were beautiful and plush. From the wall of windows Park Avenue was an elegant stream of taillights, cabs moving smoothly below us. The southern view seemed strangely quiet and peaceful, an unexpected valley splayed out before us. From other vantage points I could see the lights of Brooklyn and Queens; the far-off sunset sinking into the western sky; and the Chrysler building, tantalizingly close, a friendly giant.

It was interesting to see my old colleagues again. Everything is more or less the same in that world. People I didn't know very well would ask me about my new job, and when I explained that I was now working in higher ed, I received a lot of quizzical, vaguely pitying looks. It was like I was answering their question by chirping back, "Oh, I'm a housewife now!" I felt like I was a complete visitor to that world, a world I was immersed in for a long time. I don't know if I had ever embraced it, though. I always felt weird about being yet another uniformed young man in midtown, off to my skyscraper perch to practice law or twiddle with spreadsheets or something.

After an extremely pleasant evening with the two old friends I had come to see, the elevator gently plummeted me back down to earth. Outside I loosened my tie and chucked the name tag I had received. I walked through some old familiar streets, from Rockefeller Center to my old stop on the 1 train. I felt very lucky to be the beneficiary of corporate largess, at least for an evening, and then for the freedom to return home unburdened by unbilled hours and demanding partners. Sometimes I feel like a genius for escaping that world, or a rogue, or a thief. I still can't believe I got away with it.

Morning sprint

2010-09-08T23:30:00.001-04:00

L's alarm goes off at 6:15, but chances are she's already awake. I may stir when I hear the soft morning voices of NPR float from her nightstand, but L is probably sitting on the couch half-asleep nursing A. Some mornings I find L and A asleep together, L's neck arched to rest her head on the couch and the baby lying still in her lap. On occasional mornings the alarm actually wakes her up, as the baby has deigned to let us sleep -- but these mornings are rare.

My alarm goes off at 6:45, but I am usually awake by then. Once I have showered and dressed I find out how A has dealt with her morning; whether she is placid or fiery, whether she slept soundly or battled through the night. L leaves around 7:30, propelled by currents of unconditional love and professional ambition and a subtle but unrelenting guilt; these are the forces that drive us.

If I am lucky A will let me eat my cereal and read the paper. A happy compromise is to hold her in my lap and let her wreak havoc on the bottom half of the paper while I read something on the top. I always worry about her ink-smeared hands but apparently her constant coat of saliva repels the stain. At 7:55 we are out the door; the baby is in the stroller, my work bag is stuffed underneath her seat, the baby bag (my old backpack, which has seen me from college through Asia to A) is draped over the handlebars with my lunch sack. If I am smart I have remembered the daily log to be completed by the nanny, and A's food. Then the apartment is silent.

We walk up Tiemann to Riverside, heading forcefully up the hill that flattens out around Grant's Tomb, near 120th Street. At this point I have broken in a sweat. The walk to our friends' is about a mile from this point; it's a mile and quarter from door to door. I walk quickly through Riverside Park, under the canopy of leaves and over the uneven paving stones. I pass a few joggers, a few kids in strollers staring outwards with a look of tired perplexity, a man doing some kind of martial art in the middle of the way, and dog-walkers. Today one woman informed me that A's blanket was dragging along the ground with an unnecessary measure of spite. I don't listen to any music, but I do make inane comments to my daughter occasionally to remind her that I'm still there. She is content to stare at her surroundings and feast on her blanket, or perhaps her hand. There is an unexpected measure of balance and companionship.

We cut over on 108th Street and head down Broadway for a couple of blocks, and then we have arrived. After visiting with our friends and passing A, who is aware yet compliant, to the nanny, the dash continues. I walked ten more blocks north and arrive in my office. Despite my efforts to pace myself I am sweaty by the time I get to work; damp under my shirt, the occasional bead trickling down my neck. The back of my hair is wet. Compose yourself. You have arrived at work.

In the evening, on a good day, L will pick up A and continue walking north to retrieve me from work. The three of us stroll home together, enjoying the slow pace and temperate breeze that is an unattainable luxury in the morning. If we are smart and diligent, A is in bed by seven. Then L is still working to make us dinner. In the evening we watch television, because it asks nothing of us. L will pump more milk. At eleven we shut down the apartment. L sleeps immediately, and I try to read a few pages before I can't even remember the words on the page. At some point A will wake herself up by rolling over, or she will interrupt the quiet with a piercing cry that must represent a nightmare. Her eyes won't open, yet she is inconsolable.

And then, after whatever kind of night we have, it will all start again. This is how a home becomes a household.

On old things

2010-08-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

At home this weekend in Virginia, what struck me on that first night were the objects, the things that my parents have owned forever that have only recently returned with them from Texas: the plates and bowls with the mottled pattern of faded fruit around the perimeter; the lovely old water glasses; the ceramic pencil mug in the kitchen; the painting of the old man and the boy looking out over the sea that I found tonight in a bedroom closet. These are the objects, the talismans, that I have used and eaten from and moved around since I was very, very young. Tonight before I went to bed I washed my face the way I used to, the way I hated, where your skin feels raw and tiny traces of soap remain on your neck and near your eyes, and that was the sensation that brought me back to that broad scope of memory.

Now, of course, I have a wife, and a daughter, and my own household. Yet so much of the idea of "home" is still found in these old things. And everything I own -- goods from national chain stores, items bought in a fit of urgency or convenience or compromise -- seems cheap and insubstantial. How could a child ever build a life, or memories of a childhood, from the flimsy bric-a-brac I place into her hands?

When does this improvisation yield to permanence?

4th anniversary

2010-08-12T07:26:00.000-04:00

Today is our fourth wedding anniversary! After being struck by a bolt of inspiration on Sunday at the gym, I spent the last few nights working on this. It has been a true labor of love -- it's been fun learning how to use iMovie, culling through our pictures, finding the right songs, trying to tell a four-year story in five minutes.

Of course, I've also gotten no sleep, and I fully expect to get a cold this weekend, but L is worth it.

Book report: "Moby Dick"

2010-08-04T00:21:00.003-04:00

I spent most of July reading Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Or, If Thou Preferest, The Whale. I can't recall a book that was so incredibly tedious to read, yet left me with so much to consider after the reading was over. After a month-long trudge through chapters and chapters of cetology, the study of whales, and the historical and mythological overviews of the roles of whales and whaling in human history, I find myself thinking a lot about cetology and the historical and mythological overviews of whales and whaling in human history. I mean, damn. Maybe this was a good book!

Be warned: what follows is a book report, not for the faint of heart.

I think I spent too much of the book worried about themes I wasn't understanding, or symbolism I was missing. What is it all about? Nature and man? Vengeance? Obsession? What does a big white whale represent? How big is a whale, anyway? What does the boat look like? I was never quite sure of any of it.

Melville wrapped the entire novel -- which includes digressions into history, satire, and drama, as well as a few postmodern winks and some oddly bogus science -- in sprawling, languid sentences, long sentences like the horizon on the sea, sentences whose intricacy would be lost below their placid, boring surface, as well as by my own inattention. I often found myself realizing that something was happening -- there is a whale hunt occurring; men are dying; wooden boats are destroyed with the flick of a tail or the seizure of a jaw -- yet I had missed the action in the thickets of Melville's language. Only when I closed the book to think about what occurred could I appreciate the magnitude of these events: desperate or unbound men gathered on a boat, acquiescing to a madman's wish for revenge against a legendary white whale, the leviathan, chasing the beast around the world until the madman's appetite was satiated, whatever the cost.

But there were a few surprising things I pulled from the book; a few discrete notes from Melville's awesome cacophany. I really liked Ishmael, the narrator. He was more prominent early in the book, and later he would mysteriously disappear for long stretches so an omniscient narrator could take the reins. But as I read Ishmael's voice I felt like he would have been a friend of mine. He was naive but earnest; friendly, curious, observant, unruffled. Driven to the sea by his restlessness and frustration with humanity, he easily accepted the exotic people and places he found. He seemed like a good guy.

Along a similar vein, I thought this was a very cosmopolitan novel, in its way. The crew of Ahab's ship, the Pequod, came from all corners of the globe. Many were Americans fleeing shady circumstances or unhappy lives, but there were others, particularly the harpooneers, from Asia or Africa or the Middle East. Although the book is rife with the racism of the time, on the ocean no one claimed citizenship or pride of place; they were in a no man's land, where they could not afford the luxury of prejudice, and were forced to work and live together.

The last third of the book is the pinnacle of the voyage, when Ahab finally finds the white whale, and chases it for three long days (three days of danger, three days of death, three days of Jesus in the grave) until the final confrontation. And here's the ending of the book (SPOILER ALERT!!!1!): the whale defeats Ahab and destroys the Pequod. All of her crew is killed, yet none are granted the honor of a described death. Everyone, all of the characters we have known, and all of the ones we have not, are sent to an anonymous, watery grave. Save one: beloved Ishmael, the sole survivor of the battle, who floats in the water for two days before he is rescued. Rescued in order to tell the tale.

A couple of things about this: although the violence and drama of the final days was muted when I first read this section, it amplified as I thought about it and returned to it. Ahab's death was fitting yet tragic. The loss of beloved characters like Queequeg and Starbuck was all the more powerful for its understatement (no final words for them, no last memories of home or cries of anguish). And finally, the cataclysmic end of this book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In both works, the entire universe of the novel is utterly destroyed in the final pages. The characters and the setting are obliterated, as if they had never existed. Here, the Pequod and her crew are dashed, except for one. And of course, Moby Dick presumably survives to barrel through the seas and face other battles. Maybe that's it, then: none of it remains, none of it matters, save the water, the whale, and a voice to tell the tale.

Moby Dick: I didn't enjoy it, but maybe I love it.

State update: South Carolina

2010-08-03T00:06:00.000-04:00

This past weekend we took Alice on her first flight, down to Myrtle Beach for a nice visit with Aunt Kelsey and the vacationing hordes. Alice absorbed everything with her standard air of studied nonchalance. She slept through the takeoff from Newark, pausing from her suckling of the pacifier to smile broadly after a particularly violent lurch upward. When we held her in the gentlest rushes of the ocean surf, or when we towed her around the pool, buoyed by her hilariously absorbent diaper, she kept her poker face on -- not smiling but not unhappy either, her expressive little eyebrows raised in a face of wary enjoyment. Hey, if she's not crying, she must enjoy it. This is our mantra.

Today L told me that our super said that our baby is beautiful, but that she doesn't smile very much. I was kind of taken aback by this, but I think he's right. I think I'm learning how to reach her humor buttons -- how to get her to giggle or squeal by crowing her name in falsetto, how to make her eyes curl in a smile from a vigorous game of pattycake or a few fun lifts into the air, where she can revel in her secret identity as Space Baby. Still, she's not the most effusive kid in the world, but this is fine. She seems to be very observant, and I like that a little better, I think. Dig deep, little girl -- always investigate -- always ask the question -- remember your intuition, your irony -- take it all in -- save your smiles, but don't be stingy.

We had a great time in South Carolina. The people are so distinct down there -- many of the vacationers were orange, blond, carefree people, decked in breezy shorts and dresses, coating their words in molasses and tumbling out of SUVs. Some of the kids down there, though, the ones who seem local, have a certain wildness to them; glaring, wiry young men, and lithe young women in tight shorts with dark tans. There's a certain hunger there, that attitude you see on the beach avenues but not while you're waiting for a table at Tommy Bahama. Still, it was great to see Kelsey and to eat like kings for a few days. I can't describe the exquisite pleasure of settling in to a ten-dollar plate of a full pound of shrimp dusted with Old Bay, armed with a pile of napkins and wet naps and nice crisp Bud Light with Lime. It was heaven. (You know, the older I get the more I realize that it's all I ever wanted: a plateful of shrimp ready to be peeled, and a nice cold beer. I have many fond memories of this, which makes me wonder why I don't make this happen more often.)

Anyways, I really like the photo above. It makes me think of fatherhood and what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like I was doing it right for that brief moment. Welcome to the world -- I have you -- this is the ocean, it is beautiful -- we will always come back here -- I will always have you.

One night

2010-07-24T21:09:00.002-04:00

I.
Only after the tornado had swept through did he dare go out in the night. From the window he could see the rain boring down as cars cowered on the sides of the streets. Cords of lightening marbleized the sky and flashed through the apartment, keeping his daughter from sleep. After it was over the sidewalks were streaked with long isles of silt left by the overwhelmed storm drains. But people were venturing out, and the strange tornado had passed.

II.
He met his two friends at the wine bar. Above the din he could hear R&B songs he loved and knew well. Occasionally voices would sing along with them. The bar closed at a fairly early hour but they were still there as the tempo of the music picked up, as the bartender strutted behind the counter. After the bottle of red was gone they ordered sangria. This place made him feel sleek, that the people in the room were like the multitudes inside him.

III.
They went to another bar, smaller and emptier. He found refuge in vodka. One of his friends had to leave, but the two remained. The bartender was an artist who had made the earrings she was wearing. She wrote down the address of her blog on two scraps of paper for them. At some moment, when the two friends were talking about old and sad topics, he had enough of those old and sad thoughts. He ordered some shots and decided that they would stop talking about the matter when the drinks arrived. So they downed the shots -- the bartender poured one for herself, too -- and moved on, and his happiness returned. A girl behind him was dancing to Lady Gaga, her arms long above her head, her eyes closed, smiling. "Don't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro." He felt such joy and love! The liquor had served its purpose. The music, the dancing, himself and his friend at the corner of this bar. Her earrings.

IV.
Now they were in an empty diner. He ordered spaghetti to sober up. He didn't have any cash and the place wouldn't take cards. He walked carefully to an ATM two blocks away and withdrew some money. When he returned his friend was low in the booth and it was time to leave.

V.
They were sitting on a bench in a median on Broadway. Occasional white headlights coming forth, red taillights receding. He closed his eyes to resolve himself, yet his mind pitched and rolled on its conflicting orbits. The spaghetti returned, long and shining white on the soil.

VI.
He and his friend were walking up the street. He suddenly realized that the darkness was paling, the sky softening into day. He was embarrassed to see the morning come. He wanted to be home. He told his friend to get up, that now they should say goodbye and find a cab and abandon whatever was left of the night, before the light of a new day shamed him further.

VII.
He came home quietly into the gray light of the apartment. His wife was on the sofa nursing their daughter. She spoke softly, to avoid startling him, to welcome him back and to say good morning.

Back to the gym

2010-07-15T00:03:00.000-04:00

Tonight I went to my first non-Sunday morning gym class in a very long time. I checked out the New York Sports Club on 125th Street for the first time, after getting all of the relevant details from L. Where is the entrance again? What floor do you take the elevator to? When you come out, where are the towels? The locker room? The water fountain? The studio?

I am always nervous when I go to a gym for the first time. I assume someone will pick on me. I have been fortunate to have never really been bullied before (except in some unpleasant professional situations, maybe, and also L can really become quite merciless under the right circumstances) yet I always fear some towel-snapping juicehead is waiting to attack. Like if I spend too much time loitering on the gym floor, or if my gym performance is somehow not up to par, some dude is going to come sauntering up: "Ha ha, check out the poindexter! Let's do that thing where we flush his head in the toilet!" To combat this I make a point of walking very purposefully around the gym, even when I have no idea where I'm going, just to prove to all of my would-be tormentors that I know what I'm doing. As a result tonight I basically walked two pointless laps around the weight area, trying to look as calm as possible while my eyes were darting around furiously trying to find a water fountain. If things really get bad, I will just stop wherever I am and do some stretches, trying to find a recognizable landmark before I break into a flop sweat. I did this tonight, and that's how a guy with biceps the size of my beloved daughter's head almost walked into me as I was touching my toes. But hey, at least I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Once I finished my Lewis & Clark-style reconnaissance, I did a couple of pleasant miles on the treadmill and went to a weight training class. The class was much worse than I expected; the light weights I picked originally turned out to be too heavy, so I had to go back for even lighter ones. And shortly after that I reached that wonderful point in the workout where I couldn't even bear to hold any weight at all, so I was doing the exercises empty-handed, like a mime, but with less dignity.

Yet even as that was happening I was thinking how great it felt to be there. I really like group exercise scenarios -- having someone else deciding what to do and leading a group of people all contributing to the tacit peer pressure to show up and perform. The culture of the 125th street gym seemed to be really pleasant. A nice mix of people, a lot of classes going on (a couple hip hop classes, two spin classes, a couple of weight classes). I feel like I've given myself a pass from going to the gym since the baby was born -- I should be home, after all, bonding with Alice and taking the burden from L -- but I think I will be making more of an effort to get to the gym to recapture some of the stuff I loved about our old neighborhood. I'm really glad it worked out tonight -- that I was able to get there and that no one gave me a noogie or challenged me to arm wrestle -- and I know I will be hurting tomorrow.

New TV

2010-07-14T00:00:00.003-04:00

We have some really exciting news -- yesterday we got a new TV, one of them fancy flat-screen ones with the HD's. We opted for the "Dynex" brand. At first I thought Dynex was a new prescription drug I should ask my doctor about ("side effects may include dry mouth, chronic persperation, and nymphomania") but it turns out they just make TV's. We spent a frustrating hour or so trying to get the screen resolution just right, trying to make sure our inputs were correct, comparing our zoom options, and checking to see that we weren't wasting our time on AV-2 when obviously we needed to be at HDMI-3. What are we, farmers?

We christened our new television, which is the culmination of decades of innovation and technological breakthroughs and is designed to capture every individual raindrop, blade of grass, and glittering city light caught on camera, on a fantastically bad episode of "The Bachelorette." I think the new TV heightened my own sense of shame and personal embarrassment on behalf of the participants, but otherwise it wasn't that different from normal, low-definition "Bachelorette."

What strikes me about this show is the weird cult mentality that seems to infect all the participants like a cold sore. All of these people -- the bartenders, pharmaceutical representatives, teachers, lawyers, and medical equipment salespeople -- are linked along a sordid chain of previous contestants, starting with the Ur-Bachelor, who lived 3,000 years ago and rejected one contestant who went on to become the first Bachelorette, who in turn sent one of her cast-offs to be the next Bachelor, and on and on in perpetuity. All of the participants reassure each other constantly that they are there for "the right reasons," such as serial making out and the opportunity to recreate pathetic school-girl fantasies of fairy tale romance. And all of them aspire to be one of the lucky few who get to drag their chipper Bachelor or Bachelorette (with their telegenically capped teeth, angular jawbones, and classy hair extensions) back to their home towns, where their poor innocent family members have to spend a day ogling the couple and dividing into weird little interview clusters to talk about how all of them are all there for the right reasons. It seems like a particularly exquisite hell to have to explain, justify and defend your make-believe-let's-pretend-TV relationship on camera to your grimacing parents, siblings, and in-laws.

All of this became much clearer thanks to the Dynex ("call your doctor if your retinal discoloration lasts longer than a week"). We have learned to fast forward through the actual date parts of the show, unless it looks like people are fighting. Bring on the conflict! Bring on the artifice! Bring on the ugly cry! These are the real right reasons to watch.

("...Please don't use Dynex if you're a werewolf.")

Independence Day weekend

2010-07-05T23:50:00.002-04:00

We had a wonderful weekend. But right now I am sitting at the table in our godforsaken apartment as the ceiling fan shoves great glaciers of hot air around the room and as beads of sweat gather at my temples. It is so hot. The heat bundles itself in these rooms and starts weighing down. I expect the bed to buckle at any moment. And it's 11 o'clock at night.

Friday: We took the D and Q trains out to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. Brighton Beach is the home of a large Russian population, and we ate lunch at a boardwalk Russian cafe, where we tried borscht for the first time. Pretty darn good! Like a weird gazpacho! The quiet of Brighton Beach and the width of the boardwalk there reminded me of Rehoboth. We walked across the hot sand to the water -- the sand of course being riddled with broken glass, because since this is New York City every nice thing must have an edge to it, which means that your typical idyllic beach will be liberally sprinkled with shrapnel -- and found the ocean to be freezing cold. We continued up the way towards Coney Island, where we fought the urge to buy fried things and took in the spectacle. I appreciated the history -- the parachute tower from the 1939 World's Fair, the amusement park rides from the same era. Following our beach tradition, we had some photo booth pictures taken, and were happy to include Alice for the first time. Later we ventured out onto the pier, passing fishermen and families and men cat-calling the women. Looking back towards the beach, seeing the Wonder Wheel and the housing towers and the train snaking through it all, I was struck by the vastness of New York City. Here we could feel ocean breezes, hear the caw of seagulls, see the wide blue sky over the water. How many worlds, how many places this city contains. (Walking along the beach, I was also struck by the sheer brazenness of people -- the wildly inappropriate bathing suits, all those swathes of unrequested flesh -- that actually made me feel embarrassed for them, on their behalf, but I preferred to focus on the breadth of the City, thanks very much.)

Brighton Beach

Sunday: I started out Independence Day with a nice long run in the morning through Riverside Park. As the heat settled on our skin and in our clothes, we walked down to Lincoln Center to watch a movie, baby in tow. Here is our thinking: we did this last week with a matinee of "Toy Story 3," where the theater was empty and Alice was as well-behaved as one could reasonably expect. L would jump out of her seat as soon as the baby started to fuss, and there was no issue. Sunday we figured we would go see "Sex and the City 2: A Big Mistake" (see the pun there!) because (a) it's long, (b) it's playing in a place that's air-conditioned, and (c) everyone knows it's horrible, so no one will be there and it won't be a big deal with the baby.

Well, apparently the bitter old women of Manhattan did not get that memo, because they were out in full force. Why were they seeing this movie everyone hated, six weeks after it originally came out? Worst of all, the theater was configured in such a way that you entered by the movie screen, which means all the other patrons see you as you come in. I could feel a collective wave of feminine disdain overtake us as we entered with our stroller, so we hustled to the back row to suffer the withering gaze of some freedom-hating old hag. When I came back from getting popcorn, I actually took off the hat and sunglasses I had been wearing, so people wouldn't think I was the jerk who brought a baby to the movie.

But you know what, haters? We did bring a baby, and she did great. L had to take her out a couple times, and I had a few artificial coughing fits to camoflauge her gurgling, but she did great. No crying. (We did note the fact that under normal circumstances, we would be part of the disdain brigade, harrumphing about how a movie theater is a completely inappropriate place to bring a baby, but thanks to the challenges of parenting and perhaps even a slight mellowing of my temper, perhaps I am evolving.)

Unfortunately, the movie was horrific. It was really offensive against the middle east, and somehow the characters were even more insufferable than usual. Why does Charlotte have a full-time nanny? She doesn't have a job! All the characters who were mothers sucked at it. And their partners, the fathers, were simpering and spineless. And the karaoke scene made me want to gouge my eyes out. Other than that, two thumbs up!

We walked back to the piers on 125th Street and set up an impromptu picnic to see the fireworks. We made friends with the sweet family to our left and watched the sunset sink across the Hudson. The weather was perfect and the people were friendly, kids chasing each other and people eating sandwiches on their blankets. When the fireworks started we found that our view was blocked by a clump of trees -- and then hundreds of people were shifting and jostling for a better view -- but at that point it didn't matter.

125th Street piers

Monday: Today I took my first Manhattan bike ride, after a morning stop at the local bike shop to outfit the old bike I had as a teenager, which has been dormant for about 15 years. After pumping the tires, checking the brakes, and buying a helmet, this evening I rode down the Hudson to about 72nd Street and back. I know it's no excuse for an actual workout, but it felt great to move, to force some air around me in the illusion of coolness.

This afternoon, after lunch, I took Alice home alone so that L could enjoy a small piece of the day. The baby and I stayed in the cool oasis of her room. We read my favorite children's colonialist allegory, "The Story of Babar," as well as "Make Way for Ducklings," and a brief selection of "Moby-Dick," which she did not enjoy. Then I was holding her in my lap, and we were both sitting there rocking, me relaxing in the cool air and quiet moment, feeling her weight on me, and the baby with the pacifier in her mouth, restful in my arms. I looked at her and she was smiling sweetly, even with the pacifier, and then something happened and she was looking so clearly in my eyes, and smiling so broadly -- I started speaking to her and she would coo right in response, her mouth wide and open and happy, her eyes so intent on mine, laughing together. At that moment I expected her to speak, to say my name or her own, or to tell a joke, or to laugh like her mother. For a second she was not a baby, but my friend. A brief moment of such connection. During those moments I wouldn't have been surprised by anything. It was so lovely.

Eventually it passed, and her adorable haze returned, clouding her thoughts, her needs. But that moment! My mysterious daughter.

It's been a wonderful weekend. Now time for a last cold shower, and an escape into sleep, on top of the sheets, under the fans.

Things I'm afraid my daughter is thinking

2010-06-25T20:54:00.007-04:00

1. These people are idiots.

2. Tummy time is bullshit. On my back! Put me on my back!

3. The zoo-themed activity mat has become my personal hellscape.

4. I wish they would take me to a Tea Party rally. Comrade Nobama is a Socialist.

5. I hate this apartment.

Father's Day

2010-06-21T23:59:00.004-04:00

Father's Day! All the self-absorption of birthdays, plus the expectation that relative strangers should acknowledge it!

There's more to it than that, of course. If there's one thing parenthood points out to the recently initiated, it's that it's not about you anymore. You are merely incidental to the arrival and progress of the child. Heads snap away from you and turn towards the babe. And that's all right.

I had a pretty darn good first Father's Day. In the morning I woke up early to run a 5 mile race to benefit prostate cancer research. It was hotter than hell, humid, sticky, and the run was unpleasant. Sweaty shirt thwapping against my chest. I took my time at the water breaks, took a few steps at mile 4 to regroup for the last push. Even though my time wasn't particularly good, I was proud that I held up muscle-wise and breathing-wise -- it was just the heat that got to me, but that's always the case.

The highlight of the race was seeing Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), an amiable, Biden-esque blowhard, who made a few remarks before the race started. He also invited all of us to give him five as we started the race. So I jogged over to the side of the pack and made my way to the good senator, who stood there with an open palm and a funny grin on his face as runners slapped him five and moved along. I keep hoping someone will ask me, "Hey, have you high-fived any U.S. senators this week?", but as usual people are pretty self-absorbed and nobody seems too interested.

The rest of the day continued along this plateau of excellence. My brilliant wife gave me a Chipotle gift card, earmarked for exclusive use when I'm enjoying some alone time. Alice gave me a "Hop On Pop" pop-up book, and L even manipulated her tight little fists so that she "signed" the card and labeled the envelope. It was wonderful. Here she is signing the card:

We went downtown for lunch at Stand, walking through the soupy air with the baby strapped on my chest like a totem of parenthood. A nice lady on the subway wished me happy father's day. We stopped at the bookstore and they were very kind about it, too. After we made our way back home I escaped to Chipotle by myself for a little bit, enjoying fountain Coke and reading Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun." Along my walk I listened to Drake's "Find Your Love," which is quickly becoming my song of the summer, and thought about my great good fortune.

For dinner L made me salmon, asparagus, macaroni and cheese, and salad. We had a little bit of ice cream for dessert. We watched some television. And eventually we went to bed in our sweltering apartment, the ceiling fans spinning in their taut, chaotic orbits, the curtains billowing inwards with gusts of warm night air and the dull regular groan of the train, lying under thin cotton sheets, listening for any cries from the baby's room, anticipating another day of heat, of family, of a baby. It's a new kind of summer.

Biggest losers

2010-06-19T23:40:00.000-04:00

We are on a new fitness initiative in this house. For several weeks now, L and I have been tackling our new goal: to lost the baby weight that we have accumulated in the last few months. I face the added challenge of not only addressing the baby weight I gained through pure sympathy, but also the law firm weight I acquired during those last few months of whatever happened to be going on.

Saturday mornings are weigh-in time, when we do it Biggest Loser-style. "M, last week your weight was X. Your current weight is...beep beep beep...Y." Then we write it down on the notepad and decide how we feel about the week's progress. This week, for instance, I'm rebounding from nearly a week spent in a conference at North Carolina. There I spent many days eating industrial foods and sitting in overly air-conditioned hotel ballrooms. I also ate, for the first time, melon wrapped in prosciutto. The melon was really wet and moist, and the prosciutto was partly flapping off, and when I put the whole damn thing in my mouth I about gagged from the sensation that there was a jellyfish in my mouth. It was one of the grossest things I've ever eaten. I've never felt so betrayed by prosciutto.

This week went better as far as exercise goes -- I fit some good runs in there -- but I experienced a bit of self-sabotage. One night, after we finished dinner, I ate three slices of pizza because otherwise they would have gone bad. Another night was date night, so dinner was a platter of meats and cheeses with a glass of wine, followed by movie popcorn and Coke. Also, L brought home a pint of real Haagen Dazs ice cream -- Dark Chocolate Mint -- because (1) it had all of my favorite things in it and (2) it's a limited edition. A limited edition! How could we not eat it?

It must be said, though, that we have actually taken some concrete steps to get back on the straight and narrow that I am pretty proud of. First, I have cut out most of the soda I usually drink. Instead of a can of Coke at lunch, plus assorted Cokes throughout the evenings and weekends, I'm now drinking Canada Dry seltzer water, which is like normal water but angrier, and also vaguely flavorful. Despite the tepid flavoring, I find seltzer to be very aggressively carbonated -- way bubblier than Coke. I imagine that seltzer has so much carbonation because it's pissed at how tepid its flavors are. The lemon-lime version tastes like the faintest, vaguest memory of Sprite, and yet it's got enough carbonation to take the skin off the roof of your mouth. And yet that's a balance I can live with. Now I come home and think, "oh boy, could I use a seltzer!" But hey, it has no sodium and no calories, so why the heck not. Each day I'm saving at least 140 calories from that Coke I'm not drinking. Second, we've exchanged our ice cream for frozen yogurt (for the most part), which makes me feel virtuous, even though the texture makes me think I'm eating hunks of ice from a glacier. And third, I'm doing better with exercising consistently. I am running again, a couple runs a week for 5 miles apiece, down the Hudson River. It feels great and I can definitely feel my stamina improving already.

Even though the results of our weight loss initiative are slow and often disappointing, I'm feeling healthier and more active. Tomorrow I'm running a 5 mile Father's Day race to benefit prostate cancer research -- it will be my first road race in over a year, I think, and I'm pretty nervous about it. These days I'm not used to the hills of Central Park, although I am convinced that my muscle memory endures after all the training I used to do there. Hopefully the run will go well -- I ran today and I took it easy, but my legs still felt heavy and weak -- and then I can make it through the rest of the week without eating like a lunatic.

To be honest I'm not really concerned with actual weight loss; it's more about reestablishing a more active, balanced lifestyle, and putting in place some good habits to counteract a slower metabolism as I enter a whole new decade of life. This can't be one of those things where ever year I get a little slower, a little more out of breath, a little paunchier. Not yet at least.

Parks and recreation

2010-06-01T00:08:00.004-04:00

We had a great Memorial Day weekend. The weather was sunny and clear, the throngs of people abated, and we had three days that reminded us why we love living here.

Saturday: With Alice strapped into the Baby Bjorn on my chest, giving me the opportunity to develop new and unexpected constellations of sweat over the course of a long hot Saturday, we walked all the way from 125th Street to Lincoln Center, in the low 60s, and back -- for a nice urban hike of six miles. On the way down I was constantly aware of heads turning to stare at the baby, women gushing and cooing over her cuteness. As parents, we tried to respond modestly ("oh, thank you" with a demure smile) but eventually gave way to bald-faced honesty ("yes, she is!").

One highlight of the day was exploring the new developments at Lincoln Center. I am constantly amazed by the renovations I'm seeing throughout the city during these lean years. Where is the money coming from? Who decides that now is the time to invest in public art and topiary sculptures? I have no idea, but I'm thankful someone is deciding this. The most exciting thing at Lincoln Center is a new parabolic lawn -- a sloping wafer of green that serves as the rooftop of a new restaurant and curves upwards to audacious peaks overlooking the streets below. The edges are lined with glass or metallic fencing, creating unexpected promontories with their own peaks and swells. It is remarkable.

They've added a lot of other exciting stuff there, too, including the elegantly powerful new fountain, ringed by a sleek black bench; a new grove of trees with plenty of chairs and benches; and an intriguing shallow pool intersecting with a sloping, warmly-colored plaza. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs pointed to Lincoln Center as an example of bad urban planning: a broad, single-use space, devoid of foot traffic and isolated in its cold grandeur. It seems that some smart people have heeded her critique; every new development I saw seemed designed to create a richer, more livable, more welcoming space. And they are succeeding.

Sunday: On Sunday L and Alice met me at the gym downtown after a good workout. Once I emerged from the locker room, all fresh and clean, L put Alice in my arms (which were shaking at that point, due to the rigor of the workout). A few minutes later I handed the baby back and L looked at me and said, with the kind of sneer I thought we were no longer using in marital conversation, "Are you still sweating?" I looked down at the oblong stain on my shirt. I smelled it. "No, she peed on me." So we ended up going to the Gap to buy a new shirt for me to wear for the day. Thanks a lot, Alice.

Later we made our way back to the park on the Hudson, where we read and people-watched and let Alice nap on the blanket. We saw a few reality show celebrities and plenty of people who had clearly been working out for months and months just to be ready on the first plausibly shirtless day of summer. It was a good reminder of the pros and cons of living in the Village.

Monday: Today I cleaned out my computer, which gave me a disproportionate sense of accomplishment. And in the evening I went for a run along on the Hudson, on the new route I've found for myself: taking the path on the waterfront from 125th to the 79th Street Boat Basin and back. It's about five miles, and the path hugs the shoreline the entire time (a few sections are next to the West Side Highway, but it's easy enough to focus on the water -- on the boats bobbing along the piers, or the bridge standing tall in the distance). The path is organized so that pedestrians are on one side, regardless of which direction you are travelling in, and bikers and Rollerbladers are relegated to the other side.

Today there were a ton of bikers in my lane, which posed a problem. Do I fall off on to the shoulder, and risk stumbling into the inhospitable water of the Hudson? Or do I bolt into the wrong lane myself, thus perpetuating the original transgression?

I approached the dilemma with the same passive-aggressive, slow-boil approach that has served me so well in the past. As the bikers came barreling towards me, at first I did nothing. Then I gave one of my tried and true Dirty Looks. Then I threw up my hands in a gesture of disgust. Then I started saying, "you're in the wrong lane." Finally I was confronted with a knot of idiot bikers, coming at me at the same time as the other side of the path was clogged with others. I had nowhere to go. "WRONG LANE!" I said, a few times. One chick in a sundress and bike helmet actually had to sort of stumble off her pedals to catch the bike with her feet to avoid hitting me. I ended up maybe six inches from her handlebars. "WRONG LANE," I pointed out. "Sorry -- where was I supposed to -- the bike," she explained, but not very nicely. "You should be in the other lane, that's for bikes," I said, doing my best to explain the clear symbols and words that were paved on the surface of the path in numerous locations. I mean, Excuse Me New York. I concluded the conversation with that sound you make when you're huffy and catch the air in the back of your throat in something that's halfway between a sigh and a grunt -- if you've ever talked to me in person you know what I'm talking about -- and that was it.

All in all, a great weekend. I love this city.

Dodge Caravan

2010-05-17T22:20:00.001-04:00

We left Virginia around 3 p.m. yesterday, L behind the wheel of our rental Dodge Caravan, to return to New York after a weekend of visiting family with the baby. Due to traffic and the unyielding demands of an infant, it took us eight hours to get home. Because of tiresome rental car bureaucracies, L was the only one who could drive the car, so I spent a lot of time in the middle row, shushing A or rocking her car seat or holding a hand against her torso to remind her that human contact existed, even on the hellish eight-hour journey on which we had embarked.

At one point the baby started shrieking, so we pulled off at a random exit on 95 and wended our way down a couple more interstates until we found a place to park and get a soda. We ended up stopping for fifty minutes in some no-name town in Delaware, or maybe Maryland, or maybe Ohio, where there was nothing but strip malls, so the baby could eat and please stop screaming. The only fast food places were a Dunkin' Donuts and a Quizno's, which seemed like the result of some very bad zoning choices. We sat for almost an hour in the Quizno's parking lot, doors open, feeling the pleasant Delaware (or possibly Ohio) breeze brush up from the asphalt and waft through the minivan. I wondered where we were -- who lives here? In the Quizno's the woman ahead of me was wearing a t-shirt from a sociology club at a high school I had never heard of. When I was getting our drinks at the soda fountain, I overheard the teenage girl behind me explaining to her mother that "if you put too much ice in the cup, it fills the space the soda is in," or something equally weird. Where were we?

We spent another five hours on the road after that, listening to country radio and stuttering down the highway into a sea of constant taillights. The sun melted into the scrim of clouds and the temperatures dropped around us. We had to stop at another rest stop when the baby pooped with such volume and force that it eked out the side of her diaper and onto the car seat, and, on the front end, almost reached her belly button. When we realized this we were five miles from a rest stop, so I had to spend the interval patiently explaining to my daughter why she should sit quietly in her poopy diaper and car seat. "BE QUIET AND SIT IN THE POOP CHAIR," was my main argument. At that rest stop her pacifier dropped and bounced underneath the minivan. We sat there for a while, watching angry and frustrated people clamber out of their cars and into the Woodrow Wilson Service Area for some restorative Whoppers and Frappucinos.

Eventually we inched our way through New Jersey and alongside the cold glittering skyline of the city. The raucous lights of Tenth Avenue and Amsterdam seemed calm and welcoming after the long, long trip. Today the baby has been fussy and L and I have been exhausted. It will be good to be home for a little while.

Daddy time

2010-05-05T23:59:00.000-04:00

My dear Alice,

Today is your one-month birthday! It's hard to believe you've been with us for only a month now. It seems as though you have always been here -- always cooing and grunting from the bassinet, or arching your arms over your head at the slightest stimuli, or slowly opening your big brown eyes to begin to take in the world. And yet it's only been a few weeks.

So far, I think things are going well. You have a sweet and calm side that is almost unbearably endearing. I love it in the mornings when you are calm enough to lie on my chest peacefully, eyes open, rising and falling with my breath and staring at your mother a few feet away in the bed. It's so encouraging to see you awake and alert and quiet, observant, so that your mommy and I can show you the world and how we make our way in it, so you can begin to understand.

Since I have to spend much of the day at work, I always try to make sure I imprint on you well enough so that you'll know me. Most times when I pick you up I helpfully say, "It's DADDY! DADDY TIME!" to clarify what exactly my role is. I do not provide food (usually), but I am adept at changing diapers, and I will say that I am quite good at soothing you. Swaddle you up, shush aggressively, jiggle you to and fro, stick in a pacifier and you should be nice and quiet in a few minutes. Sometimes Mommy will be holding you and jiggling you, and I will be standing next to her, shushing loudly and bouncing up and down on my knees like an idiot. But do you know why I do it? Because I'm Daddy. And it's Daddy Time.

To be honest, there are challenging times as well: your tradition of unconquerable fussiness between, say, 8 and 10 p.m. is annoying, and I sometimes take it personally. It's also uncool when we change your diaper, and then moments later you release a massive poop. Do you understand that diapers cost money, and that you are wasting both? Frankly, Mommy and I are getting sick of your sense of entitlement.

Other than that, daughter of mine, you are wonderful. If I could rewind the clock back to one month ago, and spend all that time telling you every way and how much we love you, it wouldn't nearly be enough. On my desk at work I have a photo of your mother from our trip to Hanoi, in Vietnam, before we knew you (yet not before we dreamed of you) and right next to it is a picture of you, looking cute and beseeching and dignified on the changing table. You guys are my favorites.

Happy birthday, little blabe--

love,

Daddy

Just because I love this photo

2010-04-26T00:15:00.000-04:00

Ready to go, my love!

Surfacing

2010-04-26T00:11:00.006-04:00

Now that our girl A is about to celebrate her three-week birthday, I feel like I am surfacing once again to look around and take a breath. I haven't been blogging in the last few weeks -- haven't been doing much of anything, really. Not a lot of emails going in or out, not writing anything, not a lot of phone calls or Facebook stuff, not even finishing The New Yorker. I haven't been on the subway in a week, since we rarely leave the neighborhood these days. Our universe only extends as far south as 110th street, as far west as Riverside Park. As far north as Duane Reade. As far east as Central Park.

These are not complaints, though. Ever since A arrived we have enjoyed this insular period as a time to recalibrate our ideas of love and family, and to welcome somebody new into the most basic unit of who L and I are and how we live. It's been so pleasant, and so simple, to think of little more than L and A. Ever since A came home everything else in the world has felt distanced and glazed over. Stories in the news, reality TV exploits, pressing articles on issues I should care about, all seem relatively weightless when compared with the reality of this miraculous baby we've got on our hands.

So far I am really enjoying having A around. She is getting on a nice three-hour cycle of feeding, hanging out, and sleeping. Her arm movements are spastic yet endearing. Her eyes are full and alert now, she is gaining some plumpness in her limbs and belly, and she is working so hard to lift her big old head to take everything in. She settles easily with the pacifier (usually) and she can spend hours lying on your chest or in your arms, as long as her own hands and arms are free to flail about in whatever way her blazing little brain commands. In the mornings she is so calm and lovely. And today she pooped on my shirt for the first time. That was a funny moment, almost as funny as earlier today when L managed to drop an entire container of grapes on the living room floor, forcing us to shove the furniture around to retrieve all the gnarly, dirt-crusted grapes, now looking like unappetizing truffles, from under the couch.

Anyways, before A was born I was curious about how I would feel about her: Is it love at first sight? Does the floor drop out from under you? Like the rest of this experience, it hasn't been nearly as dramatic or sudden. Instead, it felt more like this new paternal love arrived full and complete at the same moment she did, that I turned around one moment and found that my life had a new foundation, solid and impenetrable. There was a new given, a new creed: love my wife, love my daughter. The idea of loving A was as obvious and undeniable as the fact of her own existence.

The Judges' Save

2010-04-08T22:41:00.002-04:00

The first night at home with A was kind of rough. There were three of us sleeping in that room, my wife and me in the bed and our baby in the co-sleeper beside us. Now I had two faces to seek, two breaths to listen for. We were ready to leap up in response to her cries, and we spent the whole night lurching violently into wakefulness whenever she pierced our sleep. L had it worse than me, obviously, but I was up with her changing diapers and offering my sincere if groggy moral support. Yet when I returned to bed my mind would start scraping against grim thoughts: worries about my daughter and her health, doubts in our (my) ability to raise her right, numberless questions I can't answer. It seems like having a kid opens up new depths of love in your life, but that intense love is equally matched by worry. I was thankful when the sun came up and we could rejoin the day, banishing our doubts to the night and leaving behind fitful dreams of babies' cries.

The second night at home was better. We knew what to expect and L mercifully let me sleep through a few rounds. The funny part, though, occurred earlier. During the entire period of A's existence -- that is, since Monday -- I have been surprisingly unemotional about all of the joyful ruptures in our old life. Last night we were watching the results show on "American Idol," and according to their rules, when someone gets the lowest number of votes, they can perform one last time and the judges have the opportunity -- which they may use at their discretion and may only apply once during the entire season -- to reinstate that person in the competition. This is called "the Judges' Save."

Well, last night, soul singer contestant Michael Lynche, who I really like, got the lowest number of votes. He had one last chance to perform for the judges in the hopes of winning the Judges' Save, so Michael Lynche started singing "This Woman's Work," a song that I have loved for a long time, a song about pregnancy and and childbirth and womanhood and love and devotion and commitment, and I was sitting there listening to it, and I watched the judges conferring among themselves in the foreground of the screen, and then I started thinking about the Oprah Winfrey interview with Tracy Morgan that we had watched a little earlier, where she said that every man has a dream for his family, and then Michael Lynche was finishing his song, filling every single breath with all the passion and desire he could muster as his wife bawled in the front row, and then the song was over, and the judges were whispering, and Ryan Seacrest silenced the crowd, and Michael Lynche stood there like some testament to fatherhood itself, and then the judges bantered, and then they said -- Michael Lynche had won the Judges' Save! He was still in the competition! The audience erupted. And at that point, dear reader, I lost my shit and started to cry. I hadn't shed a single tear since A was born, and now here I was crying all over the place on the couch next to L. We started laughing immediately. "What am I doing?" I said, pointing at my face. "Why the heck am I crying?" I said. But I was still crying.

"He got the Judges' Save," I said through my tears and snot. "I'm so happy he got the Judges' Save."

The day you were born

2010-04-05T23:32:00.004-04:00

This is the story of the day A was born. In case you haven't heard, A is our new daughter, born today. Objectively speaking, she is extremely cute. Her nose and lips and ears are small and perfect. She has a funny hairline. Her skin smells warm and fresh. She has deep, milky eyes. She usually has a very placid demeanor, and she reacted to her first diaper change with an air of dignified resignation. When she sleeps her arms fly akimbo and her fingers grasp for something we can't know. Her first life lesson today appeared to be, "It's OK to sneeze." Her first sneeze resulted in tears; by the end of the day she could handle it, while her parents rejoiced at the chance to bless their lovely daughter once again.

But before A realized that sneezing was ok, she had to get born first. Here is what happened. It's rated PG-13 for language and stressful situations.

The original plan was for us to head into the hospital to induce labor around 9 pm tonight. We went to bed last night expecting to spend the day waiting for nighttime to roll around so we could swing into action. Consequently, I slept late, and woke up around 9 to find L anxiously pacing through the apartment. She was having contractions, and had started writing down their times. The contractions were lurching along at irregular intervals: ten minutes, twelve, seven, eleven. I briskly showered and ate breakfast and got ready for something. The contractions intensified; L was in pain. Around 10:15 we called the doctor. I explained what was happening. "She's in labor, come on down to the hospital," they said. Okay.

Except that L couldn't come to the hospital -- she was in too much pain to leave the bathroom, let alone the apartment. She was in agony and was making the kind of sounds you don't ever want to hear from a loved one. I expected her to emerge from the bathroom crazed with rage and pain, Hulk-like, like she had been ripping the linoleum out with her fingertips. After a half hour of cajoling and pleading (including one false start) I lured her out of the apartment. She was moaning in the elevator. Outside I dashed through the crosswalk, hauling our three bags of hospital-bound stuff, as L clutched her body and slowly made her way. People were looking at us but not saying anything. I ran back to get her and hailed a cab. I loaded everything up but the cabbie said, "Wait, does she need help?" L couldn't make it through the crosswalk. I guided her to the car and we got in. Before she stepped in the car, though, my delicate orchid of a wife said those magic words that every prospective father longs to hear: "I'm going to poop in the cab." "That's ok!" I said. After slinking through a few stoplights I asked the cabbie to take the West Side Highway, to make sure we could get all the way to St. Vincents Hospital, down on 12th street. We had almost 100 blocks to go.

In the cab L's contractions started out at about two and a half minutes apart. L was gasping, moaning, yelling out, arching her back and clutching onto the handrest or window frame so hard that her muscles would tremble with her pain. And then her contractions started coming at two minutes apart. During those brief intervals I would pray that we could somehow advance 40 blocks before the next wave, but L had to suffer through each crashing wave as we slowly made our way south. Later, I would laugh that she also seemed to be having a mild Tourettic episode. "Breathe through it, honey," I would meekly suggest. "FUUUUUUUCK," she would reply. Or I would helpfully say, "Just breathe, my darling," and then she would say, "SHIIIIIIIIT." It was a useful dialogue.

Finally, an eternity later, we made it to the hospital. It was around 11 o'clock. L got out and shuffled inside as I stayed back to pay. She hadn't pooped in the cab. Our angelic driver had turned the meter off early so we could dash out quickly, and he helped us get our bags from the trunk. I gave him a massive tip. We shook hands and he wished us luck. I kind of wanted to give him a hug. As we went in, someone else called out, "Congratulations!"

We made it up another elevator to the labor and delivery floor. L held on to me, buckled over, as I explained our situation to the nurses. They ushered us into a delivery room and a nurse checked L out. "Shit, there's the head," the nurse said. Our midwife, Barri, appeared, and there was a flurry of activity as they raised the bed and got L in the position to push, summoning forth piles and piles of covers and blankets and protective gloves. "What about an epidural?" I said. "There's no time -- the head is here -- it's time to push."

I started to laugh. What the hell was going on? According to our birth plan (which explicitly stated that the baby was to be born over a week ago), we were going to have a nice, easy birthing experience, including an epidural and a veritable rainbow of the pharmaceutical industry's finest painkillers. Now we had the midwife telling us there was no time, that we would just have to push through an all-natural, granola, hippie-dippie birthing experience. Well, stop the Joan Baez CD, I'd like to get off. L and I looked at each other and laughed at how things always happen to us in the craziest possible way. This was it. I was so proud of her. At that moment, stepping off the brink together, I loved her so much.

Three or four pushes later -- at 11:19 am, less than fifteen minutes after we arrived at the hospital -- our daughter was born. She arrived a bawling tangle of blue limbs, plopped on L's belly as the midwife and nurses performed their ministrations. Our girl. A few minutes later I cut the cord, and made the nurses laugh when I said it felt like a scallop. We all laughed at the utter irrelevance of our birth plan and all of our expectations. We thought about how close we came to giving birth in a taxicab. And we would have, probably, but for a few short minutes.

We spent the rest of the day holding her, feeding her, gazing at her, taking pictures of her, speaking with loved ones all over the country and the world, and introducing Hank and John and Anna to our girl. I left to get some lunch in the afternoon and ran into an old neighbor, as well as our friends at the bookstore and Chipotle. Everyone was so warm, so happy for us -- L and A and me, our little family. It felt like a holiday in our city. What a blessing. What a tremendous blessing.

Good news

2010-04-05T22:54:00.001-04:00

Our baby has arrived!

Alice Lee

April 5, 2010

11:19 a.m.

6 lbs., 13 oz.

20 inches

L and A are doing great. My cup runneth over.

Due date

2010-03-30T23:29:00.002-04:00

Today, March 30, is the baby's due date. Obviously, given the nature of our active yet fickle little child, nothing is happening. I woke up this morning feeling like Christmas, feeling like my day had finally arrived. We have been waiting for the last weeks of March to roll around since late June, 2009. All of the holidays and hurdles that separated us from our baby -- including the holiday seasons, all of fall and winter, trips up and down the Atlantic seaboard, a move to a new apartment uptown, the end of one job and the start of another -- have come and gone. And the trophy for our patience and fortitude is L's big and glorious belly.

Rationally I knew there was no reason to expect the kid to arrive today. It's not like she received the memo that March 30 was her assigned date. In fact, less than 5% of babies are born on their actual due dates (most, especially for first-time mothers, are born after the due date). Yet I couldn't help but hope that our kid would come barreling into life on the early side. To be early is to be on time, after all. She should know that already.

So now we are winding down another day free of labor and delivery. Maybe tonight will be the night L wakes up to a strange yet not entirely unwelcome new pain. Maybe tonight, but probably not. L is convinced we will be having an April baby, and that makes sense to me.

...But it could be tonight! It's March 30, our due date! Our Christmas!

Then and now

2010-03-25T22:41:00.000-04:00

Last night I sent a photo to some family and friends featuring me modeling all of the university-branded swag I received on my first day of work:

My parents quickly responded, to the entire group, with a photo of me on my first day of pre-school, 28 years ago. I concede that there may be some similarities:

Two thoughts occurred to me: I am touched that my parents can remember such small, ancient moments. And I can't wait to similarly humiliate my kid in another thirty years.

Transitions/champagne

2010-03-25T00:06:00.000-04:00

Last week was my final week at the law firm. On Thursday they surprised me, and another attorney who was about to go on maternity leave, with a champagne toast to celebrate our new milestones. All week long I heard a lot of kind words from partners, associates, and staff, which really meant a lot to me. On Friday, I labeled all of my files for storage and cleared the last lingering items from my inbox, and then sent my farewell email late in the afternoon. I talked about how I felt grateful for the opportunity to work with, and learn from, all of these colleagues. The final lesson, though, the thing that surprised and heartened me, was the warmth of the goodbyes and the sincerity (or so it seemed) of their best wishes for the new job and the new baby. I was really touched.

On Friday afternoon, around 4:30, it seemed like there was nothing else to do. My stuff was all packed up, my desk was empty, and the usual stream of emails and phone calls had dried up. So I packed up my bag, left my security cards on my desk, and said goodbye to the two grinning partners who had been hanging around my office. I gave my secretary a hug. I said a few quick goodbyes as I waited for the elevator one last time. Although there were moments when I felt very ambivalent about leaving this position, this feeling would always burn off in a dawning sense of excitement and relief for the next chapter. Once I got to the lobby I put on my headphones, selected "Imma Be," and strutted out into the clear spring evening.

Today was my first day at my new job, at the university. I saw many old friends and had some promising conversations with people who seemed warm and friendly and personable. In the afternoon there was a champagne toast to welcome me to the office. They said how excited they were that I was there. The differences between this work environment and my previous one are many, although I can't say that one is objectively better than the other. But after this first day I am feeling very confident in the decisions I've made, and grateful for the new opportunities before me. It's exciting to enter a new environment, a new culture, with a new mission to guide you. And the fact that all of my comings and goings have been punctuated by these champagne parties -- I have discovered a new depth of my gratitude, for working with kind and gracious people who have been so warm and welcoming to me.

There were three big things I had to wrangle this spring: End the old job. Start the new one. Those two are basically taken care of. Now there's only one thing left.

Not yet

2010-03-17T23:51:00.002-04:00

This morning I was at my desk, waiting to hear back from L about her trip to the sonogram place to check on the baby's growth. Around 11:30 she called me on my office phone. When I picked up I could hear her laughing to someone else, so I thought everything was fine. "I'm in a cab to the hospital," she said. "The baby's heart rate was low, so they want to hook me up to a fetal heart rate monitor." The doctors had told her that I should meet her at the hospital. A nurse had walked L out of the office to make sure she could catch a cab to St. Vincents downtown.

I had a conference call at 12, and was supposed to attend a hearing at 2. Everything was different now. I emailed a few attorneys and my secretary to tell them I had to go to the hospital. At first I tried to be discreet but I couldn't find the words so I said exactly what was happening. I didn't care who knew. My wonderful secretary came to my doorway and helped me think of things I needed. We decided I should take the subway. I gathered a few work items, grabbed my lunch and the New Yorker, my headphones. "You know, this could be it," I said.

I was so nervous I got out at the wrong subway stop, walking briskly up 7th Avenue in my ill-fitting dress shoes at a clip that made my lower legs ache. St. Patrick's Day revelers were everywhere, laughing and plodding along in their stupid green t-shirts. A lot of green Yankees paraphernalia and orange wigs. In the hospital I remembered how to get to Labor & Delivery, but I had to stop at two different nurse's stations to find L. I thought of the other times I had made similar trips, navigating an unknown hospital to find my wife hidden in some small undistinguished room.

She was lying on her side in a hospital gown, a nest of tubes and wires snaking out from her belly. The room was filled with the constant, reassuring thrum of the baby's heartbeat. She was smiling. Everything seemed to be fine.

We sat there for almost two hours, as doctors and nurses came in and agreed that things seemed perfectly normal. We watched a little bit of TV: some CNN, some TLC, the "Full House" episode where Michelle learns to tie her shoes and Uncle Jesse admits he never graduated high school and decides to go back. It wasn't as poorly written and un-funny as I feared it would be; it wasn't bad at all, except for the unnervingly intimate close-ups. I've never seen a sitcom with such tight close-ups. It was like "60 Minutes" or something.

Ultimately they discharged us; L got dressed and we staggered back out into the day. A part of me had hoped this would be it, that the day would end with a baby. But I suspected we would probably just head on home. The doctors concluded that the low heart rate had been a fluke: maybe L had been sitting in a weird way, maybe the baby had been squeezing the cord or something. Who knows. Nothing to worry about.

We stopped at the bookstore visit with our friends, and ate lunch at Subway. We both returned to work rattled. I had a couple of beers at the office's St. Patrick's Day happy hour, organized my personal emails and eventually went to hip hop. Class was great tonight; we had a sub, and he was doing really intricate, asymmetrical stuff, based on the California style of krumping. Then I came back home to see my pregnant wife and wind down this day.

Now at day's end, I'm glad we were able to go through a dry run of things. L told me she had initially gone to the wrong floor of the hospital. Now she knows which floor to go to, and I know which subway stop to take.

On my subway ride down to the hospital, I had started to get excited. If the baby was going to be born today I could just wear my suit at the hospital for the next few days, my nice starched shirt getting wrinkled and soft after a couple days of broken sleep. This necktie would always remind me of the day my daughter was born. The work I brought would have gone untouched, but I might have read the New Yorker. We didn't have a lot with us, but it would have been enough.

There was that sense, riding the train down to see my wife and my daughter, that this could be it. The question kept rising in my mind, and the realization that there was no wrong or bad answer made me revel in the asking: Why not today? Why not right now?

Eventually, soon, we can answer. But not today.

Pull the trigger

2010-03-11T23:42:00.000-05:00

Today I resigned from my job. This was a long time coming. Last night I received word that my new job had come through, that I had found a place to land. I was nervous to tell the folks at work that I would be leaving, and that I would be leaving the firm to work at a university in a non-lawyerly way. I expected them to snicker and say that I could never make it as a lawyer, and that now I was tucking my tail between my legs and slinking off to a different and easier world.

Obviously no one said this. They were actually very supportive, and very surprised. They even said they'd miss me. I told a bunch of different people today, basically relating the same narrative of opportunity, decision, and commitment, and the reactions varied: some were shocked, or aghast, or euphoric, or proud, or even jealous. And they all wished me well.

The foundation below the happiness and relief I felt today, though, was a sense of my own autonomy. Seeking out this new opportunity, winning it and committing to it reminded me that I am a free man. Not on anyone else's track, with no one to answer to but my family; my choices are my own. And I'm making them.

To be honest, I hadn't felt this strong and burly and in control and convinced that I'm the man since I found out I knocked up L. Today I felt proud of myself for finding a way out of an untenable situation, and for finding a new opportunity that is better-suited for my family and me. I was also thinking that this is how life is -- choices and consequences, transitions and opportunities. All of it in the service of a vision that is growing clearer every day.

Looking ahead: my last day of work is next Friday the 19th. My first day at the new job is Wednesday the 24th. And this baby girl of ours is due around Saturday the 27th. At this point the only thing I'm sure of is that all of my careful little plans will most likely be blown to bits, whenever this kid decides to make her entrance. And that's all right too.

Breakdown

2010-02-28T19:27:00.002-05:00

Well, I broke. I don't know if it was seeing all the baby loot we acquired at the shower last weekend, or else the time I spent the other night considering the mechanics of baby clothes, with all of their snaps and clasps and tiny little safety pins, or else our trip yesterday to Baby Buy Buy Buy, when we selected a mobile for the crib of plush pastel little insects -- fireflies, ladybugs, caterpillars -- all sleeping peacefully and smiling gently from their cozy orbit, or else the moment in the store when I found myself binging on onesies, pink ones, yellow ones, with their snug matching hats and bibs and burp cloths, embroidered roses or butterflies or bouquets, imagining soft tiny sleeves filled with fat baby arms, imagining the snaps and clasps and pins securing a warm tiny body, imagining my rose, my butterfly, my bouquet -- sometime in the middle of all that, I admitted to myself:

"Ok, this shit is fucking cute."

30

2010-02-25T23:55:00.003-05:00

Today is my 30th birthday. It's been a quiet day, but eventful in its own right -- a slow day at work, a trip down to L's office to surprise her at her baby shower, and a lovely taco night at home, punctuated by messages and phone calls from people I love. I always find that the fact of my birthday becomes a secret burden to shoulder. On the subway, at work, in meetings, on the street, you want to tell everybody, "It's my birthday!" But this is not something you can do in polite conversation. No one ever asks a question where the direct answer is, "It's my birthday!" It's not like people go around saying, "Is there a reason today is special for you in particular?" But that's ok. Carrying that secret is part of the fun.

This morning L gave me my birthday gift, and it's a doozy. She compiled all of the blog entries I've posted here, from January 2005 through December 2009, and had them bound as a hardback book: "Clarity," by MKD. She had a bunch of our friends and relatives write blurbs about the blog that she posted at the front of the book. She had a little "About the Author" section at the end. She meticulously formatted the book, and selected a cover image, and the right font, and she produced a book of my blog entries that's approximately 700 pages.

I was floored when I realized what she had done. At first I thought she had gotten me some random book called "Clarity" because it had the same title as this blog. Then I saw my own name on the dust jacket and just couldn't believe what I was holding. I took the book to the office this morning (wrapped in bubble wrap to protect it) and spent a lot of time today rereading the words I wrote back in 2005, before I was in law school, back when L was just my girlfriend, two apartments ago.

To be honest, it made me proud to read all those old entries in a book, continuously, one after the next. I could see some themes and common ideas emerge that I hadn't noticed previously. It helped me understand what I'm trying to write about. Although I was nervous to read my old stuff I was pleasantly surprised -- there were some good turns of phrase, and some old memories which were suddenly cast in high relief. It almost felt like a real, standard memoir -- maybe with just a little work to bridge some of the gaps, you could really have something. I've read it up to March 2006 and I'm excited to follow that old trail back to the here and now. I find myself stupidly excited to read about old trips, or the marathon, or fun times with L. Like I told my parents tonight, I find the book to be a real page-turner.

One of my colleagues at work today said that L had given me the best gift anyone ever could, because she had given me my memories. This is very true. I am astounded by my wife. I am so thankful for her and for the opportunity to look back and reflect on the last few years -- it seems like a good use of a birthday. It made me almost giddy to hold this thick old book of my own words, my own report of the last five years of my life.

As I mentioned earlier, L composed a brief little "About the Author" at the end of the book. She told me she had been very thoughtful about what she said and how she said it. She wrote:

MKD is a writer. He was born and raised in Virginia and educated at the University of Virginia, Columbia University and Fordham Law School. Michael lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. This is his first collection of writings.

When I read that I felt a pang of anguish and happiness and love in my heart. I thought: What a life ... To live that life!

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P.S. By the way, if anyone is interested in purchasing their own copy of this ridiculous book you can order it online for about $28 (to cover production costs). Let me know and I can send you the link.

Beautiful Saturday

2010-02-21T23:03:00.007-05:00

Yesterday was a really magnificent day. The weather was a little warmer and the sun was strong in the blue sky. It was L's baby shower, so Melissa and Anna arrived early to set up and bustle around in the kitchen for a while. I had made plans with John to head down to Benny's Burritos for some margaritas while the ladies feted our wee baby.

I was in a good mood heading downtown; the air was crisp and the skies were clear. Upbeat music in the headphones, spring in my step. The Village sidewalks were crowded with people enjoying the day, out and about with their shopping bags or strollers. I got to Benny's around 2 and went inside; John wasn't there yet. I left the restaurant to wait outside on the sidewalk, to watch the people and enjoy the old neighborhood, when who do I see coming up but -- Ashesh! I have a distinct impression of seeing his face and the bright green triangle of his scarf. Even though he's only in Philadelphia (studying at Wharton; I think he's taking some kind of evening-division part-time GED prep class or something) I haven't seen him since he left the city last summer. We stood on the sidewalk chatting when who comes sauntering up but -- Russell! Russell lives in Colorado and spends some time in Virginia, and I only get to see him a couple times of year. I hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving and I wasn't sure when we would hang out next. A little while later John arrived, brandishing a bag from my favorite bookstore and laughing at my incredulity, and we went inside to sit.

(This surprise was orchestrated by L, of course. Amid the hubbub of her shower and everything else going on, she engineered an early birthday celebration for me. I was floored.)

It made me so happy to share a table with these guys. As we were sitting there, eating and drinking, I tried to take in how it felt - a beautiful afternoon outside through the plate glass windows of the restaurant, good drinks, catchy songs playing in the background, John on my left, Russell across the table, Ashesh on my right. A table of some of my favorite people, somehow finding themselves in this old dive. I had a dumb grin on my face, feeling happy and at ease and very thankful. I couldn't believe these guys would make the time to be here and shoot the breeze for an afternoon.

To be honest, during this whole pregnancy there have been some moments of extreme loneliness. A few weeks ago, when we were at the Buy Buy Baby Maternity and Childcare Emporium, I remember feeling very overwhelmed by the sheer amount of junk and information and decisions and childrearing philosophies that seemed to demand immediate analysis and commitment. I have missed having family close by, to impart some wisdom, offer guidance, and help contextualize this new baby into the larger story and tradition of our families. True, our families are never too far away, and we speak with them often and think of them even more often, but the idea of raising our kid here by ourselves can be daunting. We have relied so much on the new community we have knitted here, but I miss the old comfort and shared history of old, genuine friends.

That's why yesterday struck such a deep chord with me. After we left Benny's we made our way to Wogie's for a couple of beers. Finally we returned to John and Anna's, where we rejoined Anna and L. John cooked up a delicious dinner, we watched the Olympics and played some poker, sipping on Old Pogue and sambuca.

Yesterday I felt contented and grateful and at peace. To be honest, I felt a kind of easy happiness with life that I haven't enjoyed in a long time. I tell you, man -- with the love of a good woman, and the kind of friends who will come up to the city on a lark for a long, late winter afternoon of margaritas and poker -- these are the days and the people I can't wait to introduce to my daughter.

"The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Sloan Wilson

2010-02-15T18:06:00.003-05:00

"'I was my own disappointment. I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness -- they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.'"

When I was little, when we would go spend summer weekends at my grandparents' place in Rehoboth Beach, I was always drawn to the few old hardbacks on the bookshelves. I distinctly remember two of them, always found in their same alcove every year, next to an old photo in a plastic frame and a few hardy seashells: Sloan Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," and a book by Ian Fleming on Jamaica. The Wilson book in particular stood out; the cover was old and tatty, a relic from the 1950s or 60s, and featured a man in silhouette wearing a fedora, hands clasped behind his back. Why didn't he have a name? Why was he in shadow? Like most objects and events of my childhood, I was vaguely afraid of this.

I was thinking about this book recently and bought it online on a lark. I found an edition from 2002 with an endearingly ugly cover -- preserving that iconic silhouette man -- and featuring a new introduction from Jonathan Franzen.

Reader, I loved this book. I don't know if I've ever read a book that so closely matched my own life and circumstances. I was expecting another typical post-war suburban angst book: man and woman in bitter marriage, loathed or ignored children, drunken escapades, casual violence, sullen train rides into the city. And yet: the protagonist here was a decent young guy with a smart, beautiful wife. He changed jobs in an effort to find meaningful work that challenged him yet allowed him time with kids. He was loyal to his old grandmother. He treated people fairly. He was honest with his boss when he could have been a yes-man. He struggled with his past in World War Two, with the violence and infidelities that had somehow made sense in a senseless place. Ultimately he reconciled his shameful past with the future he wanted to build for himself and his family. He did it with integrity.

I found this book to be so inspiring and appropriate for me right now. The author's afterword from 1983 highlighted how young people have always been very responsive to the novel; how they have understood, unlike the critics who caricatured the book as yet another backhanded slap at postwar life, that this is actually a story of unironic aspiration and resilience. I was surprised by the sourness of Franzen's introduction which highlighted some of the weaknesses of the book (notably its rushed, pat conclusion).

I consider it a real gift, and a funny little curlique of life, that I happened to read a book I've been toying with since I was a little kid at this particularly apt moment of my life. The edition that I just read was published almost 40 years after the original hardback I eyed for all those summers, yet the man remains, waiting to be read, waiting to be understood. The passage I highlighted above really bowled me over, and the lines that followed resonated as well:

"'I needed a great deal of assistance in becoming an honest man. If you hadn't persuaded me to play it straight with Ralph, I would be thinking differently now. By a curious coincidence, Ralph and a good deal of the rest of the world have seemed honest to me ever since I became honest with myself...I would have gone on, becoming more and more bitter, more and more cynical, and I don't know where that road would have ended. But now I'm sure things are going to be better. I've become almost an optimist.'"

Hey, thanks for your help

2010-01-21T23:49:00.004-05:00

Speaking of work, today a secretary copped some major attitude with me for no reason at all. Since my assistant was out, I went to ask her to turn some documents into PDFs for me, since she works with the associate I was helping. Being the polite, professional, chivalrous dude that I am, I said, "Could you please help me? If you could turn these into PDF's and send them to me, that would be great." Note the use of "please," as well as that weird past imperfect subjunctive -- that was not accidental. This is my go-to grammatical construction to ask people to do things without sounding like a jerk about it. Feel free to try it, it will probably work.

In response to my request, she glared up at me and said, "Don't you have your own secretary?" Oh, snap. No, you did not. Being the unfailingly polite dude that I am, I sort of backed down, hemming and hawing about how I could do it myself. "No, give it to me," she sighed, and I gave it to her. Then I backed away meekly and returned to my office.

I sat in my chair for a minute and thought about what happened. And then I realized, this secretary is not older than me -- she is my age. And excuse me, but I thought one of the general ground rules around here was that if you're going to treat me like crap, you need to be significantly older than me. Filled with righteous indignation, and with a solid plan in my head (no more polite questions - only statements), I went back to her. No more Mr. Nice Past Imperfect Subjunctive Guy.

I said, "please give me the documents back." She was getting up and she said, "No, I'm making the copies now." She started walking towards the copy room. I followed her, saying, "No, give me the documents." She said, "No, no, I'm doing it." I said, "No, stop, give me the documents, I need them." I was looking for someone else in the hallway to make eye contact and share my facial expressions with, since I was almost yelling at this point, or at least someone who could maybe pin her arms back so I could retrieve the stupid documents.

Finally she relented and gave me my papers, and then I asked another secretary to help me, and she did so in a completely courteous and thorough way. It took her about ten minutes to do the job. I told a secretary friend of mine about this little fiasco, and she gasped and said, "But you're an attorney!" Yes, I am. But I never even thought about it like that -- I was more focused on the fact that this chick was my own age and was treating me like crap, and this time, for once, being the hierarchical and authority-fearing dude that I am, I didn't have to sit back and take it. But it was a pretty hollow victory, let's keep it real. My major triumph was that I got my papers back and didn't let her make my PDF's! Ha!

Why the face!? What is wrong with people?

Big lights will inspire you

2010-01-21T23:34:00.003-05:00

Sarah's post about music and driving and "Empire State of Mind" definitely struck a chord with me, and reminded me of watching Alicia Keys perform "Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down" on SNL a couple weeks back. This song shares the same chorus as the Jay-Z anthem, but Alicia's sitting at the piano for this one, singing verses about the city and its people until the drums kick in at the tail end. When I saw it on SNL the song gave me chills, over and over again, listening to her sing about the struggle of the city, how tired it can make you, but then turning on a dime and singing that sense of striving and urgency that draws people here like a magnet. It's a song that describes the place I've chosen as my home, and it seems like a challenge too, something to live up to. Even the way her voice swoops upward on that chorus, veering perilously close to cracking but finding that note and holding it -- somehow that captures it all, too.

It's been awesome to see the city adopt this song as an anthem. It makes me think about what I'm doing and whether I'm living up to it. It makes me feel like I spend too much time watching TV and eating Chipotle when I should be doing other, greater things. Like how the fact that I work in 30 Rock, just a few floors above the studios where they make SNL, can be such a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. What dreams I had for myself.

But hey - I'm still in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new.

"Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters"

2010-01-11T23:21:00.004-05:00

I just read a really interesting book that was recommended to me by Ryan, husband of L's cousin Kristen (thus making him basically my brother): "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters" by Meg Meeker. I have thought a lot lately about the kind of family life I want to build for the three of us: a specific architecture of values, traditions and habits that requires some purpose and forethought.

I was excited to read this on Ryan's recommendation, even though he warned me about some of the God stuff in the book. I felt like the author was writing from a very solid conservative Christian background, which is not exactly the environment in which we will be welcoming this kid. The approach to sexuality was drenched in horrifying statistics about HPV and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as earnest hypothetical anecdotes about one day discovering that your own daughter is the centerfold model in your hunting buddy's new issue of Playboy. Statistically, this is very improbable. They only have 12 centerfolds a year!

On the other hand, though, nothing riles up my inner social conservative like the prospect of guiding my daughter through the next 20 years of our increasingly degenerate pop culture. I think about the TV shows L and I thoughtlessly watch, the winkingly obscene music I enjoy (see below), and I wonder how you can protect a child from that stuff when she sees the world innocently and genuinely, without that shield of irony and cynicism that we adults grasp instinctively. The book had some excellent instructions and reminders about a father's role in his daughter's life: his centrality, his moral authority, his modeling of the way men and women interact and how a young woman should expect to be treated. I found myself agreeing with much of it, and feeling a renewed confidence in my own instinct and the way that L and I can complement each other in raising our girl.

There was excellent stuff about the need for fathers to say "I love you," to show affection, to establish boundaries, to make yourself known, to truly listen, to take your daughter on special outings. I particularly loved the chapter on humility, which really resonated with me and seemed to go hand-in-hand with the value of empathy. The book made me excited to raise our girl and thankful to be able to look back and see so many ways that my parents did all of these things, all of these traditions and simple ways of living that I can't wait to pass along.

As expected, the book hits hard with the God stuff, which I did not really enjoy. One big question L and I are grappling with is the role of religion in our kid's life, and in the life of our family. We're not actively going to church these days, and I'm struggling a lot to find a resolution that seems to carry some integrity with it. I want my kid to have a firm moral grounding, but I have so much doubt and anger towards the church's own moral authority. I don't want my daughter thinking she has to submit to a church that doesn't treat her as an equal. I don't want her assuming some of the chuch's toxic attitudes towards women and sexuality. On the other hand, I think the church has done a lot of good in the world, I think it maintains a strong intellectual tradition that I want to pass on, and I think its message about love, charity, sacrifice, forgiveness, and devotion is fundamental and something that a kid should begin to wrestle with. I don't know. Doubt is a part of faith, I know that. I'm just trying to reconcile all of this so that we can figure out what to do with our girl with some measure of integrity. Integrity, and not superstition.

Anyways -- "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters." I really enjoyed it and I gave it to L to read, too. I mentioned architecture before and I think that's really what I'm trying to do: I want to think about this purposefully, to enter fatherhood with an idea of our compass and our goals for our life together. Now I'm just working on the blueprint.

D*** in a box

2010-01-04T22:54:00.005-05:00

Man, I still love this song. It has been rumbling around in my head for the last month or so, and then I realized that somehow this saucy little number has entered my mental canon as a legitimate Christmas song. I can look forward to this chestnut every December for the next fifty years.

Of course the true power of the song was only realized a couple weeks back, when L's cousins Kristen and Ryan were in town and we wound up capping off a day of casual but sustained drinking with a three-hour bout of karaoke at a second-floor dive bar in K-Town, glued to the pleather benches until 2:00 in the morning, maintaining a steady flow of O.B. and generously sharing the tambourine, belting out "D*** in a box" as well as many other timeless classics. That was one hell of a night, although we paid the price the next day. Thank God they didn't have sake.

Anyways, I bought "D*** in a box" on iTunes the other day, and it isn't as good. It's a little more extended, and there's no laugh track. Although I can appreciate the production a little more, the song seems a little removed from the scrappy video that was so good a couple years back that I still can't get it out of my head.