Happy birthday, Alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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.