sounds familiar

If there is a stinking dance show on the television, Sharaun will find it.  If there’s not one, she’s got one recorded and will watch that.  Man I hate dancing shows.

So I grab the laptop and don some headphones and listen to music and surf the internet and write.  Newlyweds, take note: this part of a successful eleven-year marriage.  I can silently protest these despicable dance shows and their infestation of my living room while at the same time listening to some funky breaks and maybe watching an old episode of HBO’s Braingames on YouTube or searching Amazon for the best Led Zeppelin biography.  Later, we’ll reconvene, husband and wife, and it’ll be as if the dancing show never happened.

I might get a bowl of cereal here shortly.  I downloaded a ton of vintage Smurfs cartoons for Keaton a month or so ago, before I’d heard about their coming CGI resurrection, and she’s been really into them.  So much so that she begged Sharaun to buy some Smurfs cereal in the store the other day.  Turns out this stuff is just Fruity Pebbles, but with only blue and white crunchy things.  Since my favorite cereal on the face of the earth is Cocoa Pebbles, and Fruity Pebbles is close, I’m pretty dang fond of the Smurfs cereal.  And, hey, there’s not much like the 10pm bowl of cereal to cap a night.

I flew today.  The half-hour flight on the sawmill shuttle.  We zoom high above farmland and the Marin Hills.  In the morning the stewardess brought me a Nutragrain bar, the strawberry kind, and I’d already finished my coffee so I ate it with a dry mouth, laboring over each cement-mix piece.  In the afternoon flight, the flight back home, the stewardess (a different one) offered me a choice between a school-lunch size bag of pretzels or the same size bag of chocolate cookies.  I chose the chocolate cookies and discovered, upon opening them, that I had been deceived as they were simply some kind of “wafer thin” cracker thing with dryish chocolate things embedded in them.  Again dry and again I’d already tossed back the last of my (afternoon) coffee so it was like chewing ashes.  Tasty ashes.

Thinking about taking the family to Disneyland next weekend to celebrate Sharaun’s birthday.  We did it last year and really enjoyed it.  Disney is not cheap.  You can’t really get a weekend down there for a whole lot less than a grand.  That’s pretty insane for a weekend.  But man I love Disney.  I’ve looked into tent-camping near the park; there’s one RV place within walking distance which charges $30 a night for tent spots – a body could save $50-$70 a night doing this.  There are some nice state parks within driving distance, but then you’d have to park.  Hotel is likely the simplest option with a one year old.

‘Night.

I don’t know if it’s a temporary side-effect of seven weeks away from the sawmill, but I’ve been consciously less “over zealous” about all things bread-winning since returning.  I realize that sentence stretches the limit of structure and comprehension so I’ll re-phrase: It’s hard to see the return on working as hard as I was before I left.

I think this has always been the case, it’s just my natural tendency to “fill-up” on work.  I’m no workaholic, in fact I’m inherently quite lazy, but I do tend to take on work as it comes with very little selectivity.  Put simply, unless I determine a task has zero value, I’m apt to accept it and find a way to get it done.  At the sawmill this trait is received well, and has earned me both dollars and accolades.  In the grand scheme of things, however, I feel it’s both unnecessary and potentially unhealthy.

One can achieve workplace success in eight hours daily; it most certainly can be done.  Modern cubicle-bound jobs, however, have transcended the physical and geographical boundaries which governed our jobs of yore.  I don’t need to be anywhere in particular to do my job, nor do I have to work during any prescribed timeslot.  If I have an internet connection and a computer I could work in 23min bursts from midnight to 7am and no one would care if I was on the moon.  The unbounded nature of these jobs in the tele-presence age makes for easy “infection” into what, historically, has been non-working hours.

And that’s where you get burned.  It’s so easy to do mail on your phone, take one call at 11pm, work on that presentation after church on Sunday.  I don’t go to a steel factory, a refinery, a coal mine, or an assembly plant.  I don’t punch in at 8am and clock back out again when the dinosaur pulls that bird’s tailfeather.  Work happens on my terms, and as great as I believe that is for productivity and flexibility it can be lethal to the concept of real free-time.

Being away for seven weeks reminds you of this.  Truly severed time is precious and should be savored.  I vowed to myself that I’d be vigilant about this sawmill-sprawl.  Better guarding my 5pm and 8pm and Saturday mornings.  It may seem like this theme is one that dominates my writing, or that I devote a lot of time to it.  So maybe I do.  I suppose I started writing four paragraphs ago simply to comment on how I’m less-busy, and happily so, since returning.

Don’t worry, though, I’m sure work will fix that… it has a way of filling in the cracks and I have a way of letting it.  I’ll remain on alert for encroachment, though, you can bet on it.

Goodnight.

Hit every green light this morning on the way to work.  I love that.

Cohen had his one-year pediatric check-up visit this past week.  At this visit the doctor takes stock of your child, taking inventory of their development and reporting back to you on such arbitrary things as head-size as compared to average, weight compared to average, mobility, verbal skills, and the like.

Whether it’s always been this way or not, these visits are also a time for parents to sit back and revel in the uniformity (or non-uniformity) of their progeny.  I suspect that many modern, rat-race respecting, parents could, in fact, digest the findings of these check-ups with some amount of heartburn.  I try not to allow this; for the most part I don’t care if only my kid and two others globally have heads of a size.  For someone overly concerned with benchmarks and milestones and having their child be “on schedule,” however, I understand this could be a nervous moment.

The suspicious among you might say that all my cool aloofness is perhaps born out of necessity.  Cohen, you see, is all out of whack with where Keaton was at this time – and where most other kids are, to boot.  A year old and he’s not crawling, not walking, not even showing the slightest interest in flexing his leg muscles.  While we were home in Florida during the RV trip, his cousin, three months his junior, was crawling circles around him while Cohen looked on, unimpressed and apparently uninspired.  Heck, he only just started pulling himself up to sitting under his own power just a few weeks ago.

The doctor was interested in this.  Sharaun explained that he’s far from immobile.  In fact he can scoot with some mean velocity, so quickly that I’ll often turn away for a second to find he’s inched off into another room.  At the same time, the majority of attempts to get him to stand on his own, clutching your fingers in that way babies do, are met with his pure indifference.  In the bouncer he simply tucks his legs up and rests his weight happily.

Testing his reflexes, all things appear to be assembled correctly, so that’s a relief.  Initially, the doc wondered aloud if she should have him “evaluated” (whatever that means, I assume by some developmental/physical therapy person).  Hearing this, Sharaun said she could feel her heart rate double in her veins.  As soon as she’d considered this, though, the doctor reneged on the thought and instead opted for the much more parent-palatable advice to, “Call if he’s not crawling on his knees by fourteen months.”

This seems ultimately reasonable to me… I mean exactly whose schedule is the kid on, anyhow?  Not mine; not Keaton’s; not the world according to the WHO statbook, as far as I’m concerned.  While I want little man growing and advancing as expected, I’m not really in any great hurry for him to start toddling around the house.  It’s seems funny to dedicate five paragraphs to saying something like, “I’m not concerned in the least,” but… I’m not concerned in the least.

As far as words go, he’s got “uh-oh” and sometimes what I think is a cognizant “thank you,” but not the apparently expected “mama” and “dada.”  To be fair I don’t remember when Keaton’s then-otherworldly vocabulary developed and flourished, so I’m not sure if Cohen’s is behind or even with her or what.  I do know, though, that he’s entirely doomed if I’m going to hold him up to her as the example of development in the talking and vocabulary department.  So, again, I’m not that uptight about it.

Milestones… pffft.  Whatever.  Goodnight.

I’m getting older.

It’s a fact.  Despite how I may look to myself in the mirror, it’s there.  I see it most in my forearms.  This might sound strange, but sometimes when I’m driving I’ll look at the bare stretch of arm between my cuffed sleeve and the back of my hand.  That hair-clad length, announced by a fancy shirt rolled to look casual and broken by a watchband and finally topped by a gold wedding band… it’s a picture of how I must look on the outside. Old; established; a family-man; company-man.

One of the more interesting phenomenon around getting older, at least to me, is the way getting to know your friends’ parents changes.  When we were younger, friends’ parents could be imposing, scary.  Authority figures but not your authority figures.  Old people who do dinnertime a little different than it’s done at your house.  Old people who let their kids watch different movies than your folks allow.  As far as relationships go, as a kid mine with my kid-friends’ parents were surface and cordial.

In my thirties now myself, I suppose I’m grown up.  Sometimes there’s a moment where you realize that parents (not just your own, necessarily) are a pretty great thing.  Meeting the parents of your peer-group becomes something different entirely. See because you’re all adults now.  Yes different ages, but past a certain age the field gets leveled a bit and now you’re all just humans watching the clock from different places.  Friends’ folks can be a window into what made a friend what they are today; gave them the feathers that now makes you flock together.

More, though, and what I wanted to write about, getting to know your friends’ folks is reminder of that generation’s mortality.  And, by extension, the mortality of your own parents.

As adults you can relate… at this point the twenty-to-thirty year delta between you means a lot less than what it did when you were diapers or on training wheels.  No you’re probably not going out for drinks on Friday, but it’s a lot different than what you had as kids during sleepovers.  A dad of a friend gets cancer and you can feel that; you feel for his wife, your friend’s mom, for your friend, your friend’s family.  Your friend’s mom dies unexpectedly and it’s not only sad but scary; stings doubly because you know this: moms are starting to die; dads are starting to die.

And amid sharing in the grief when a friend loses a parent, you can’t help but be reminded of that.

“You hear about Mitch’s mom?  She passed away last weekend.”
“What?!  She was just out to visit not a month ago, right?  We did that barbecue… she seemed great.”

Moms and dads are dying and that, man, is a bummer.

See ya.