We have a chalk board on an easel in our living room. Sangeeta uses it to write words for things that Saranya is familiar with, like yogurt, egg, happy, etc.
The other day, Saranya was rubbing the chalkboard and getting her hand all covered with chalk dust. Then she went to show her hand to mommy. “What’s that on your hand, Saranya?” asked mommy.
“Egg!” explained Saranya.
(She had erased the word “egg” with her fingers!)
Saranya woke me up by licking my face. When I spluttered and looked her in the face, she proudly shouted “I’m dog!” and started panting.
I was doing pretty good this year. Last year I got sick 8 times, but so far this year I’d only been sick once.
Until last week.
Last week I got a sinus explosion. It wasn’t bad. It actually reminded me of times when I was sick in elementary school, when I could stay home and work on things that I wanted to work on instead of going to school and endure the ridicule of my peers. Fond memories.
Then on Thursday Saranya got the pukes. That was a scary time. We weren’t sure what was wrong with her or how serious it was, and we stayed alert for signs that she was getting worse or that the vomiting was a sign of a more serious condition like meningitis or a bowel obstruction. Fortunately, she recovered fairly quickly and we were able to relax a little.
Yesterday, Sangeeta and I got whatever it was Saranya had last week. We didn’t puke, but for 2 days we were pretty sure we were about to let loose. It was awful. We had to lie down all day just to take the edge off. Oh it sucked. That was not a pleasant illness like the one I had last week. This one was incapacitating. I found myself wishing for time to pass; wishing to sleep for 48 hours and let my immune system do the cleanup without having to experience the altered consciousness of the disease.
Coming out the other side of it, I see that I wouldn’t have a weight problem if I always reacted this way to food. A little food is all I can handle, and eating more than that makes me feel nauseated. Usually, however, eating a little food makes me want to eat a lot of food, and I can’t stop until I feel uncomfortably full. Hmm, feels like a poorly adjusted regulator in my brain…
I’ve realized that becoming a father has caused real changes in me.
I’ve been sick for a few days now. Nothing serious, just some congestion. Well, a lot of congestion. In fact, I’m a snot factory. A booger explosion. Keep clear.
I had a nap yesterday afternoon, and while waking up from that sleep I had not so much a dream but a fear. I was afraid of being dead. Writing it down now makes it seem so trivial, but I felt a deep fear of never having access to memories or sensations again. What else is life but memory and sensation?
Oh yes: anticipation, plans, and goals. These seem to be important components of life, or at least of staying alive and being successful as a reproducing organism and/or a member of a society. We have goals relating to whatever our function is, we make plans to achieve those goals, and we try to anticipate the consequences of our actions in order to formulate the steps of our plans. Unless of course we’re stupid, in which case we take steps that aren’t likely to take us to our goals.
There’s a popular saying that insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same repeated action. I have a problem with this, and not just at the superficial level where there are hidden variables or probability waves or whatever that can really cause different results from repeated actions. My problem is that this isn’t what I think of as insanity - it’s more like stupidity. More generally, stupidity is choosing actions that are not likely to bring about the achievement of your goals, whatever those might really be.
Addiction is a sort of hard-wired stupidity. We get locked into a feedback loop with our rewards system. Normally, we assess our progress with our emotions. When we’re doing well, we feel good. When things are going poorly, we become angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, etc. Ideally, these negative feelings should motivate us to make changes and adapt to our new environment. Unfortunately, there are ways to suppress them and bring about positive emotions without making progressive changes. Drugs are a prime example. Use a drug and you feel good. Now the system that normally works to guide you to your goals has been sabotaged, and now your goal is to keep tricking it for as long as possible. Other things can do this as well, and they’re all things associated with addiction. Eating, drinking, sex, gambling, masturbation, etc. All of them are ways of managing feelings, but they all have potential negative consequences. When you get into the negative consequences but you maintain the behaviors anyway, that’s when the addiction becomes apparent.
At the end of last week, I became very depressed. It was awful. I felt useless. Other people seemed to be easily doing harder things than what I was struggling and failing to do for weeks on end. Also, working at a University can really make me feel old and washed up sometimes. So much youth! That part of life has passed me by, never to return. I mourned its loss.
I got a sunburn last Saturday. We drove up to Santa Barbara to visit my aunt and a small handful of assorted cousins. My mother rode up with my wife and daughter, and we had a nice conversation. She’s still disappointed that she didn’t brainwash me properly to accept her religion as the ONLY TRUE religion, but at least she’s happy that I try to be a good person.
We went swimming that afternoon, and apparently my sunscreen washed off enough of my untanned bits (usually shielded by a t-shirt) that I turned lobster color on my shoulders and upper arms. Other than that, it was a satisfying trip. Saranya loved throwing things into the pool. My mom spent hours telling about her family and things she remembered as she was growing up. Having been raised at least 1500 miles away from most of my relatives, it’s kind of odd to realize that I had a great uncle who owned a brothel and a saloon. It also seems apparent that my mother’s mother was forced to marry down in social standing after she was found to be pregnant. Oops.
On the trip back I found out that my brother Matt was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, which explains some of the obsessive-compulsive behavior, social awkwardness, and lack of empathy. Brains are funny things.
By Tuesday, however, I was very happy and confident again. There was no good reason for it. I’m still overweight. I’m still struggling with my programming. The housing market is still out of my financial reach despite years of diligent saving and investing. But hell, as long as I don’t think about that stuff I feel fine. I just need distraction or (even better) delusion and I feel great. Isn’t that awful? I think that’s why almost nobody can deal directly with reality. We all have our distractions and fantasies and delusions and optimistic beliefs because just taking reality as it comes makes us feel too awful.
So now I guess it just turned Thursday. My sunburn has been itching all day. It’s been a marginally productive week so far, and on top of that we’ve got a large looming license deal in the works. It probably won’t be big enough for me to retire on, but for sure it will give us a boost to grow the company into something a bit more effective. I might even be able to buy a new home for my growing family. That should distract me for a while.
My daughter is really getting on my nerves.
She woke me up this morning. 3 hours after I went to sleep, I woke up to find her pouring cold water on my ass. I jumped and yelled at her, and she dove onto the pillow and pretended to be asleep.
20 minutes later, when I was trying to get back to sleep, she tried to kill me. Luckily, her head landed on my jaw and not my temple. She had been standing on the bed and let herself fall backward to land flat on her back on the bed. Unfortunately for me, my jaw was where her skull landed. The bleeding from my mouth has stopped now but it’s swollen and throbbing.
I’m again getting over a cold. This is my 7th illness this year! It’s really frustrating and crippling.
Saranya is still a clown. She’s figured out how to turn on the TV and likes to turn the volume up but then she panics and runs away when it gets too loud. Her dancing is getting a little bit more sophisticated. She jumps and waves her hands around now too. I bought new guitar picks but haven’t been playing much. I found my sunglasses in the video camera bag, along with a pen and a wooden spoon. I hope she’s over the habit of taking a big mouthful of milk and letting it run down her front and into the carpet. The whole living room smells like spoiled milk and I think we’re going to have to shampoo the carpet to get rid of it.
I can’t type anymore.
I’m getting over a cold. It seems that every time Saranya brings something home from daycare, it infects and sickens me.
Maybe it’s the illness, but I’m developing a new perspective on things. My apartment is cluttered and tainted by spilled milk, my laundry is (mostly) soiled and worn out, I eat the same kinds of things every day that I ate the previous day. I spend my free time reading, playing games, or hanging out with my family. We occasionally have a freakout and have to leave the apartment to get some change of scenery. One of our ongoing goals is to protect the world from the inconvenience of our child until she’s developed and trained enough to do this for herself.
Saranya is quite a clown. She likes to wear a bucket on her head while she plays. She’s getting interested in books, which she sits and “reads” in the dark. She sometimes walks around with a rubber band hanging out of her mouth and wiggling. She’s figured out how to turn off the TV but not how to turn it on. She can put a video tape into the VCR. She still really likes bouncing. She makes funny babble noises, and talks to me in the same “monster” voice that I use when I play with her. She likes taking things and putting them in or behind other things. I think she may have thrown away my sunglasses. All my guitar picks are gone. She makes me show her my hand when I’m playing guitar, to make sure I don’t have a pick. If I do have one, she has to take it and put it somewhere hidden. I used to know her hiding spots but not anymore. Maybe I’ll find a pick this evening…
I didn’t realize I’d gotten so busy! Having a child is very taxing. It takes a lot of time and energy and attention to take care of the baby and make sure she’s doing okay. Saranya is doing okay. She’s starting to take her first tentative steps, and she babbles like a loon, sometimes making herself laugh in the process. It’s pretty funny when it happens, so it makes everybody else laugh too.
Work has been heating up this year too. I’ve made my first web deliverable PLM for an experiment, and we’ve collected data. I’m now working on two more. Trying to get out of the Windows-only trap. It’s been challenging, but I’m learning a lot and the rewards are potentially great.
I’m still playing World of Warcraft. I’ve also gotten myself a bicycle and I’m starting to learn to use one again. The crippling pain in my feet is almost gone, and my back feels healthy and not as delicate as it used to. I’m starting to lose weight after gaining so much while recovering from my injuries. Things are improving after a long downward spiral.
It’s Monday again. I haven’t written here much lately because I’ve been pretty distracted.
I’m developing a new program at work using Flash and PHP. This is surprising because I barely know how to do anything in both of these realms, and yet I’m planning to rebuild my application framework using these two technologies by the end of next month.
It’s been getting colder. Not compared with other parts of the world maybe, but sub-70F feels cold to me and I don’t like it. I prefer 90F or more, to be honest. More chaos.
Saranya is getting easier to manage and also cuter.
